Before there was a name for it, Utah Valley ran the world's word processing.
That sentence sounds like local boosterism. It is not. For most of a decade, the software that lawyers, government offices and universities across the United States used to write things was written in an office park in Orem, Utah, by a company most of its customers could not have placed on a map. A second company, founded a few streets away and later headquartered in Provo, sold the software that let office computers talk to each other, and for a while it owned that market too.
Then both of them lost, quickly and almost completely, and the valley spent the next fifteen years being described as a place where nothing much happened. That description was wrong the entire time, and the reason it was wrong is the interesting part of this story.
It started because a city needed to type
In the late 1970s the City of Orem had a Data General minicomputer and no good way to write documents on it. Alan Ashton, a computer science professor at BYU, had been working through the problem of what a word processor ought to do. Bruce Bastian was a BYU graduate student who had arrived to study music — he had worked with the marching band — and moved across into computer science.
The city gave them access to the hardware. They built the software. And in the arrangement that followed, Orem got what it needed and Ashton and Bastian kept the commercial rights to sell the program to anyone else running the same machines.
It is worth sitting with that for a second, because everything downstream depends on it. A municipal government, buying an internal tool, let two men keep the right to sell the tool. Nobody in the room had a reason to think that clause mattered. Within fifteen years it had made both of them among the wealthiest people in the country.
Satellite Software International was formed at the turn of 1979–1980 to sell it — the build and the incorporation straddle the two years, which is why sources disagree about which one to print. The first version of WordPerfect shipped in 1980, aimed at other Data General customers. In 1982 they ported it to the IBM PC — the version was numbered 2.20, continuing the count from the minicomputer releases rather than starting over, which tells you they still thought of themselves as a Data General company at the time.
They were wrong about that, profitably.
Why it won
WordPerfect displaced WordStar, which had been the market leader, and then held the top of the market for years. The usual explanations given are the features — and they were real — but the feature that mattered most is the one that sounds least impressive.
Reveal Codes. WordPerfect let you split the screen and look at the formatting instructions underneath your document, as a stream of tags you could see and delete individually. When a document went wrong, you could find out exactly why, and fix that instead of retyping the paragraph.
That is an unglamorous capability. It is also the reason law firms would not let go of it. A legal document is a formatting problem as much as a writing problem, and a program that shows you its work beats a program that hides it. By the end of the 1980s WordPerfect's reported share of the legal market was north of 90%. Some firms are still on it now, decades after the rest of the world moved, and the lawyers who defend that choice generally cite Reveal Codes first.
The other advantages were practical rather than elegant: a very deep printer-driver library at a time when getting a document out of a machine and onto paper was genuinely hard, keyboard commands that a trained secretary could run faster than any mouse, and a support operation that answered the telephone. WordPerfect's phone support was free and it was famous, and it was a competitive weapon in an era when the alternative was a manual.
The company renamed itself WordPerfect Corporation in 1986. Its revenue climbed into the hundreds of millions. In a valley whose other major employer was the Geneva Steel mill on the lakeshore, a software company with thousands of employees was a genuinely strange thing to have, and it changed what growing up here pointed toward.
The five years it all came apart
WordPerfect's dominance was built on DOS, and DOS ended.
In a graphical environment, the keyboard-command system that made WordPerfect fast for experts became a thing to unlearn. Reveal Codes, the crown jewel, mattered less to a user who could see formatting on screen. Every structural advantage the company had was specific to the world that Windows was in the process of replacing.
It could still have gone differently, and the reason it did not is a sequence of missed release dates. WordPerfect for Windows arrived late and did not arrive well. WordPerfect 7, the first 32-bit version, shipped in May 1996 — roughly nine months after Windows 95 and Microsoft Office 95 had already reached customers. Its initial release had notable stability problems. It did not carry Microsoft's "Designed for Windows 95" logo.
Nine months is not a long time in most industries. In that one it was the whole race.
Microsoft also had advantages that no amount of engineering in Orem would have neutralized: it controlled the platform, it sold Word through corporate contracts that made switching costs enormous, and it bundled the product into a suite that made the individual purchase decision disappear. Novell would later sue Microsoft over that conduct, arguing that WordPerfect's technical troubles in the Windows transition were caused in part by anticompetitive acts. That litigation ran for years.
Revenue turned. Management churned — an executive committee replaced the company's operating leadership, which is rarely a sign of health. And the company that had defined an industry started looking for an exit.
$1.4 billion, then nineteen months
Novell bought WordPerfect in June 1994 in a stock transaction reported at about $1.4 billion, taking Borland's Quattro Pro spreadsheet in a related deal to assemble a suite that could stand against Microsoft Office. Ashton and Bastian each came out holding something close to $700 million in Novell shares. The Wall Street Journal read the merger as a marker: the end of the period in which a small independent software company could go head-to-head with Microsoft and expect to survive.
Novell sold the WordPerfect product line to Corel in January 1996. Nineteen months. The reported price was less than a tenth of what Novell had paid for it.
That is the number that ought to be on a plaque somewhere in this valley, and is not. It is one of the largest and fastest destructions of value in the history of the software business, and it happened to a product that was, within living memory, the thing everyone used.
Corel still sells WordPerfect. It has a small, extremely loyal following, concentrated where you would expect — law offices, some government work, people who learned it in 1988 and were never given a reason good enough to switch.
The Provo half: Novell
Novell is the part of this story that Utah Valley tends to under-tell, partly because networking software is harder to explain at a dinner table than a word processor.
Novell built NetWare, and NetWare solved the problem of making the computers in an office behave as though they belonged to the same organization — shared files, shared printers, shared logins. Under Ray Noorda, who ran the company from Provo, it became the dominant network operating system in the world through the late 1980s and into the 1990s. If you worked in an American office in that period, there is a strong chance the machine on your desk was speaking a protocol written in Provo, Utah.
Novell lost its market for reasons that rhyme with WordPerfect's, though the mechanism differed: Microsoft built networking into Windows itself, and a capability that comes with the operating system is very hard to sell separately. TCP/IP and the internet then re-drew the assumptions the whole product rested on.
The company did not vanish so much as migrate. Novell was founded in Orem in August 1980 and only later made Provo its headquarters. Its headquarters moved east in the 2000s, the company was acquired in 2011, the acquirer was itself folded into a larger software group in 2014, and the business has changed corporate hands again since. Noorda's own later work, funding and incubating companies through an investment group based in Lindon, spread the money back across the valley in ways that are still visible.
Where it happened, and what is there now
There is no heritage trail for this. If you want to stand where it happened, what you are looking for is not a building but a pattern.
The corridor. Run north from University Parkway along the Orem and Provo boundary and the land use changes: low, wide office buildings set back behind parking, on parcels sized for a company that expected to keep hiring. That is not generic suburban office park. It is the specific footprint of two firms that needed several thousand desks in a valley that had never had to accommodate several thousand desks before, and the roads and utilities were widened to match. Everything built along that spine since — and a great deal has been — is building on infrastructure those two companies caused.
The campuses. Both companies operated large purpose-built campuses, and both outlived their original occupants. Big-floorplate office space in Utah Valley is a durable asset; the tenants have turned over repeatedly, and the buildings have not. If you work in tech in this valley, there is a reasonable chance your employer occupies square footage that was laid down for a word processor or a network operating system.
The university. BYU's computer science department did not produce WordPerfect by accident and did not stay the same size afterward. A local employer that can absorb a graduating class changes what a department teaches and how many students it can justify enrolling. That loop — university feeds employer, employer justifies university — is the least visible piece of the inheritance and probably the most important.
What you will not find is a marker. For a valley that is otherwise fairly diligent about its own history, the software chapter is oddly unmemorialized, and the reason is probably that it ended in a loss. Nobody puts up a plaque for the company that came second.
What it left behind
The temptation is to file this under cautionary tale. That reading is available, and it is incomplete.
The buildings. The office corridor running along the Orem–Provo boundary and north up the valley is at the scale it is because two large software companies needed room here before anyone else did. Utah Valley did not have to invent an appetite for technology campuses; it already had the pattern.
The people. This is the real inheritance. Several thousand people in a valley of this size learned, inside two companies, how to build software, sell it nationally, support it, and run a business at scale. When those companies contracted, the knowledge did not leave. It dispersed into new firms — many of them founded by WordPerfect and Novell alumni, many of them founded within a few miles of the original campuses.
That is the direct ancestry of what gets called Silicon Slopes today. Not a state program and not a stroke of luck. Two failures whose employees stayed put. Our Silicon Slopes explainer traces the modern shape of it, and the companies founded in Utah Valley list runs the roll call.
The habit of the improbable. A city clerk's word-processing problem became a billion-dollar company. A municipal contract clause made two men extraordinarily rich. Provo later built its own municipal fiber network and eventually handed it to Google, which is a story with a similar shape — an ambitious technical bet by a small city, with an ending nobody drew up at the start.
Both founders spent the decades afterward giving the money away, and a striking amount of it landed back in this valley rather than somewhere with better weather. The clearest case is Thanksgiving Point in Lehi, and the Ashton Gardens inside it — a working farm and garden complex that exists, directly and traceably, because a word processor sold well.
The honest take
Utah Valley's software history is not a story about winning. WordPerfect lost. Novell lost. Both lost to the same competitor, for overlapping reasons, inside the same few years.
But the standard measure — did the company survive — is the wrong one for a place. What a region gets from an industry is not the stock price. It is the buildings, the roads that were widened to reach them, the university programs that grew to feed them, and several thousand people who learned that a company of consequence could be run from here. Every one of those survived the collapse.
The valley that produced WordPerfect in 1979 was an agricultural and steel economy with a university in it. The valley that emerged from the wreckage in the late 1990s was a technology corridor that had not yet been given a name. The failure is what did that.
Related Guides
- Silicon Slopes Explained
- Companies Founded in Utah Valley
- iProvo & Google Fiber: How Provo Built a City Network
- Geneva Steel: The Mill That Built the Valley
- The History of Provo
- Famous People from Utah Valley
- The Oldest Businesses in Provo
Published August 2026. Dates, corporate transactions and the reported acquisition figures in this article were verified against published records this month. Where a sale price is disputed across sources, we describe the scale of the transaction rather than assert a single figure.
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