Wow I am stoked to read this. I grew up in the shadow of wordperfect/corel/novel and always imagined I would end up working for one of them. The first "hacking" I ever did was in jr high when I finally got to mess with computers all day - which had been donated by wordperfect and thus permanently shined with the blue of wp5. At 16 I got my CNA and landed a job at novel, however after starting to sign papers they informed me you had to be 18. Great. Changed my mind, traveled the world, lived in england, fell in love with programming, ended up back in utah valley 6 years later. Actually worked as a developer for a company that was in the first novel building down by geneva steel and later with another company at what was the wordperfect complex.
Now I realize the future I always imagined working for one of these companies is only going to come from creating it myself. It's interesting that his story starts with a recession forcing his hand into innovating.
I wouldn't normally make a long winded "personal" post on hn but I figured no one else is really going to care about word perfect history so I may as well give my two cents for posterity. Anyway back to building the dream - what else are weekends for?
Oh I should have made that more clear. Corel was in utah (well a division of it at least) after they merged/bought word perfect. They basically changed the name on the business park to Corel and went about business as usual. And when I say in the shadow of I mean both figuratively and literally as the business park sat up on the hill overlooking my jr high and it felt like that was my destiny if I didn't want to work at Geneva Steel. Oddly I did work down by geneva steel as a vw mechanic before delving into computers full time.
Now I realize the future I always imagined working for one of these companies is only going to come from creating it myself. It's interesting that his story starts with a recession forcing his hand into innovating.
I wouldn't normally make a long winded "personal" post on hn but I figured no one else is really going to care about word perfect history so I may as well give my two cents for posterity. Anyway back to building the dream - what else are weekends for?