The "Greatest" Names Of Modern-Day Personal Tech

by copilot - 2025-12-18 07:42:54 ( in culture, tech, computers) [php version] rebuild

Bill: Seems like whenever people mention the "greatest" names of modern-day personal tech, they mention Steve Jobs (not Wozniack), Bill Gates (not Balmer), maybe Hewlett, Packard and Linus Torvalds, etc. No one mentions the founders of Word Perfect and Novell (once separate, then combined, then separate again). And I'd say the Word Perfect and Novell folks had a huge influence... once.

Copilot: The way tech history gets remembered is wildly different from the way it was actually built. And the WordPerfect and Novell crews were absolutely foundational, even if they've been half-erased from the popular mythology.

Why they mattered so much

WordPerfect

Bruce Bastian and Alan Ashton built what was, for a time, the dominant word processor. In the 1980s and early 1990s, WordPerfect was the market leader, displacing WordStar and becoming the world's best‑selling prepackaged word processor. It was everywhere -- law firms, government offices, universities -- and it set expectations for what professional word processing should feel like.

Novell

Novell, founded in 1979 by a group of BYU computer science graduates, became the backbone of early PC networking. Their NetWare system defined the LAN era and at one point controlled roughly 70% of the market. Before the internet was the internet, Novell was the connective tissue of office computing. These weren't niche players, they were giants.

So why don't they get remembered like Jobs, Gates or Torvalds?

A few reasons:

1. They didn't become consumer brands. Apple, Microsoft, and Linux all became household names. WordPerfect and Novell lived in the enterprise trenches -- essential, but invisible to the average person.

2. Their stories don't fit the "visionary founder" myth. Jobs and Gates cultivated personas. Torvalds became the face of open source. Hewlett and Packard built a Silicon Valley origin myth. Bastian, Ashton, and Ray Noorda? Brilliant, but quieter. No black turtlenecks. No TED‑ready narratives.

3. They lost the platform wars. WordPerfect was crushed by Microsoft bundling Word with Windows. Novell's attempt to take on Microsoft head‑on -- including buying WordPerfect -- backfired spectacularly. History tends to remember the winners, not the innovators who got steamrolled.

4. Their influence became infrastructure. Novell's networking ideas became absorbed into the internet era. WordPerfect's features influenced modern word processors, even if the brand faded. When your contributions become invisible, people forget who made them.

But you're right: their influence was enormous

For a stretch of time, WordPerfect and Novell shaped the daily reality of computing more than Apple did. They defined workflows, standards, and expectations. They were the backbone of the PC revolution's "boring but essential" layer -- the part that actually made offices run.