In 1990, WordPerfect Corporation was the most successful software company in America. Employing more than 5,000 people in Orem, Utah, it controlled roughly 70 percent of the global word processing market, generated over half a billion dollars in annual revenue, and shipped its product in 28 languages to 120 countries. Every box contained a cardboard keyboard template, a narrow strip designed to sit above the function keys on an IBM PC. F7 to save and exit, Shift-F7 to print, Alt-F3 to reveal codes.
For millions of office workers, that strip of printed cardboard was the entire interface: a row of function keys and the muscle memory to use them. Eight years later, the Orem offices were closed. Five hundred thirty employees were told not to come back. The company that had been valued at $1.
4 billion was sold for $186 million, and the 14 buildings it had filled at a campus called Canyon Park sat mostly empty. The story of how the most popular software in America vanished in under five years begins not with a startup founder but with a computer science professor and a marching band director who had no business building a software empire. Alan Ashton was a professor at Brigham Young University, a methodical man with a PhD who had spent years thinking about how text should behave on a screen. Bruce Bastian arrived at BYU to direct the Cougar Marching Band.
Ashton saw something in the music student, convinced him to switch to computer science, and the two began work on a problem almost nobody in 1977 considered urgent: a word processor that treated a document as a continuous, scrollable stream of text, with formatting commands hidden behind function keys and a display that approximated the printed page. The IBM PC did not yet exist. There was no market for what they were building because the machine it would run on had not been invented. In 1979, a contract with Eyring Research changed everything.
Ashton and Bastian were hired to write a word processing program for the city of Orem’s Data General minicomputer. When they delivered the software, they negotiated a clause that let them keep the commercial rights to the code. City officials saw it as a small concession for academic software written for a minicomputer. That concession would cost Orem taxpayers millions in lost revenue and seed a billion-dollar industry.
In September 1979, Ashton and Bastian incorporated as Satellite Software International with a third partner, Don Owens. By March 1980, they shipped their product, SSIWP, for Data General minicomputers at $5,500 per copy. The production cost was $25 per boxed unit. There were no outside investors and no venture capital.
By the end of 1980, the company had 16 employees. Revenue for 1981 reached $850,000. The turning point came with the IBM PC. WordPerfect 2.
0 shipped in November 1982, written entirely in x86 assembly language because no C compiler available for the PC could produce fast enough code. Every instruction talked directly to the processor, making the software fast, precise, and compact. It also meant every line of code was married to Intel’s architecture; moving to another platform would require rewriting from scratch. By 1986, WordPerfect had captured nearly a third of the IBM-compatible word processing market, with revenue of $52 million and 350 employees.
An accidental support strategy became a weapon. WordPerfect published a toll-free sales line, and customers discovered they could call it for free technical help. Management recognized the promotional value and kept it running. By 1986, the company averaged 8,000 toll-free support calls per week, with technicians gathering bug reports and feature requests that fed directly back into development.
At the same time, the product shipped with hundreds of hand-configured printer drivers, covering nearly every printer sold in America. In a world where every application had to manage its own printing, this was an unbeatable advantage. And then there was reveal codes: press Alt-F3 and the screen split, showing every formatting code embedded in the document. Users could see exactly what the computer was doing with their words and fix problems at the level of the machine.
Lawyers loved it because they needed to know precisely what was inside a legal brief before filing it. No other word processor offered anything like it. In May 1988, WordPerfect 5. 0 launched with installation bugs, and the support calls became a flood.
The company generated so many toll-free calls that it saturated AT&T’s entire 1-800 capacity for the state of Utah. Delta Airlines’ reservation system went dark. American Express customer service calls stopped connecting. One software company in a single office park accidentally brought down the toll-free telephone infrastructure of an entire state.
Revenue still grew 75 percent that year, reaching $196 million. By 1990, sales exceeded $500 million, the headcount swelled to 4,000, and 7 million people worldwide were using WordPerfect. Bruce Bastian’s net worth climbed to $840 million, enough to make the Forbes 400. The product at the company’s peak was WordPerfect 5.
1 for DOS, released in November 1989. It ran on 128 kilobytes of memory and booted to a blue screen with white text and a blinking cursor. Users memorized the function keys the way they memorized a phone number. The company’s culture matched its product: no outside debt, no venture capital, no board of directors.
WordPerfect was the largest private employer in Utah County, and most of its 5,000 employees lived within 20 minutes of the office. The seed of decline was already in the ground. The function key interface would not translate to a graphical operating system. The assembly language code could not be compiled for Windows.
The printer driver library would become worthless the day Windows took over printer management. And a company generating over half a billion dollars in annual revenue employed not a single programmer with meaningful Windows development experience. In May 1990, Microsoft shipped Windows 3. 0.
Three million copies sold in the first year. Every application would need to be rewritten for a graphical interface with a mouse, pull-down menus, and a built-in printer subsystem. WordPerfect had zero Windows developers. In 1991, Microsoft shipped Office, bundling Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for $495, the same price as WordPerfect alone.
WordPerfect had no spreadsheet and no presentation software. Its first Windows version, shipped in late 1991, was slow and unstable. The function key combinations users had memorized conflicted with Windows shortcuts. The printer driver advantage disappeared overnight because Windows handled its own printing.
And the assembly language code base made the Windows version nearly impossible to debug, maintain, or extend. The engineering decisions that had made WordPerfect the best word processor ever written had also trapped the company inside its own success. In March 1992, Pete Peterson, the man who had joined as a $5-an-hour office manager, built the sales and support operation, and coined the name WordPerfect, was fired after opposing an aggressive push into Windows development. Ashton and Bastian expanded the payroll by 40 percent between 1992 and 1993, but revenue growth stalled and the Windows version was still not ready.
In 1993, WordPerfect tried to answer Microsoft Office by partnering with Borland International to create a suite combining WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, and Paradox. The market rejected it; the programs had been written by different companies and the integration was shallow. On March 22, 1994, Novell, headquartered in Provo, Utah, just minutes from Orem, announced it would acquire WordPerfect Corporation for $1. 4 billion in a stock swap.
By the time the deal closed in June, Novell’s stock had fallen, bringing the actual value to approximately $855 million. The strategy failed almost immediately. Novell renamed the suite Perfect Office, tied it to networking features most customers did not use, and assigned networking sales representatives to sell word processing software. The cultures collided.
Engineers and engineers left. Less than two years later, on January 31, 1996, Novell announced it would sell WordPerfect to Corel Corporation, a Canadian graphics software company, for $186 million. Roughly 87 percent of the value was destroyed in 22 months. Corel tried, shipping WordPerfect 7 for Windows 95 in May 1996, but the initial release lacked the designed-for-Windows-95 logo and was incompatible with Windows NT, preventing deployment on the law firm and government networks that had kept WordPerfect alive.
On June 25, 1998, Corel announced it would close its research and development division in Orem. Five hundred thirty employees lost their jobs in a single announcement, 20 percent of Corel’s worldwide workforce. WordPerfect development moved to Ottawa, Canada, and the software copyright that had listed Orem since 1980 was changed. The 14 buildings at Canyon Park emptied out and sat underused for years.
Alan Ashton took his share of the proceeds and built Thanksgiving Point in Lehi, Utah, a community destination with museums, botanical gardens, and a golf course, then founded a venture capital firm. Bruce Bastian came out as gay, left the LDS Church, and dedicated the rest of his life to philanthropy and LGBTQ advocacy, creating the BW Bastian Foundation in 1997 and donating millions to fight same-sex marriage bans. He died on June 17, 2024, at the age of 76. WordPerfect is still sold.
Corel, now operating under the name Alludo, charges $49. 99 for the standalone word processor, which runs only on Windows. Its market share sits between 0. 02 and 1.
5 percent, while Microsoft Word holds roughly 95 percent. But the software survives where its strengths still matter: law firms use it because reveal codes gives them formatting control Microsoft Word has never matched, and the French judiciary still trains clerks on it. The engineers WordPerfect hired and trained went on to found dozens of companies across Utah Valley, a region that now calls itself Silicon Slopes. WordPerfect did not lose to a better word processor.
It lost to a different operating system, and by the time it understood the difference, the war was already over.