WordPerfect Corporation

It started in 1979 in Orem, Utah, as Satellite Software International, founded by graduate student Bruce Bastian and his professor Alan Ashton, and in 1982 renamed itself after the only product that mattered. WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS (1989) became the office standard, complete with a plastic template over the function keys and Reveal Codes, which showed exactly which formatting codes were buried in the text.

The Windows version arrived late and half-hearted, and Microsoft Word took the market while WordPerfect was still thinking in DOS. Novell bought the company in 1994 to build an office suite against Microsoft, gave up two years later and sold the product to Corel for a fraction of the price. Law firms and American courts kept using it long after everyone else had moved on.