Roy Noorda, the man responsible for moulding Novell Netware into the dominant local area network OS during the 1980s, died yesterday (Monday 09 October) following a prolonged battle against Alzheimer’s disease.

Noorda will perhaps be best remembered as the man who first offered that several interoperating elements of the computer industry indicated that a single company needed to cooperate with another so that their individual products worked together. Working in that relationship—where necessary—as both partner and competitor (in a term he coined as “co-opetition”), many companies have since benefited from Noorda’s vision, and in today’s modern networked world it’s certainly commonplace for competitors to sidestep rival histories to work together for mutual gain.

During his business life, Noorda was somewhat of a company CPR specialist, and he is known for altering the floundering fortunes of companies such as Boschert, General Automation, and Systems Industries.

In 1983, Noorda returned to his native Utah and became president and CEO of Novell, a position he maintained through 1995. Across those twelve years, Novell created Netware, the first networking software for the blossoming Intel-based PC market. Netware linked the desktop to printers and file servers and allowed the movement and exchange of information and messages over the network. Noorda’s dream of transplanting the tech industry’s growth surge to Utah was certainly realised, and Novell expanded from a mere 17 employees to more than 12,000 as Netware evolved into the leading PC LAN (Local Area Network).

Born in Utah, as the son of Dutch immigrants, Noorda eventually retired as the founder of Canopy Group, a venture capital group that invested in technology start-up businesses—most of them based in his home state of Utah. Noorda died aged 82.