Cs were not made to be networked. At least that is what everyone thought. Everyone but Ray Noorda, that is.

TITLE: Chairman, chief executive, Novell HOW LONG AT COMPANY: 1982-1994 BIRTH DATE & PLACE: June 19, 1924 Ogden, Utah EDUCATION: B.S., electrical engineering, University of Utah SIGNIFICANT ACCOMPLISHMENT Founded Novell; solved the LAN problem

PCs were introduced in the early 1980s as stand-alone devices. Just one step above a hobbyist's toy. Their transformation into corporate network nodes was nothing if not a painful process filled with setbacks, dead ends and occasional breakthroughs.

If one man could be credited with shepherding the PC LAN into its current central position in corporate infrastructures, it undoubtedly would be Noorda.

"Uncle Ray," as he was known to employees of his company, Novell Inc., didn't actually write the code for the first local-area network. But he did something a lot more difficult: He created the market and provided the training to make it successful.

"Ultimately, he gets the credit for solving the LAN problem. He didn't invent it, but he made it happen," says Craig Burton, a former Novell executive and head of the Burton Group Inc., a Salt Lake City-based research company that he formed in 1989.

Along with the market creation came the development of an infrastructure the industry is still modeled after today. Noorda also is credited with first understanding the need to train the reseller channel and pushed Novell to create certification programs for engineers, a tiered VAR channel and an education channel. These were all pioneered and made a success by Novell in the 1980s under Noorda's command. Microsoft Corp., IBM Corp. and others rushed to copy the Novell channel programs, sometimes doing little more than changing the names.

And why not? It was a model that worked well and still works.

Besides creating a LAN market, Noorda's Novell is responsible for shaping the industry and the channel to a larger degree than its competitors would like to admit.

The son of hard-pressed Dutch Mormon immigrants, Noorda's life was shaped by early experiences in the Depression, friends say. Growing up in Ogden, Utah, Noorda was a bartender, a pinsetter at a bowling alley, and a railroad worker, where he had the backbreaking job of transferring cargo. These hard-scrabble early years are responsible for Noorda's famous thriftiness and extreme work ethic.

"He was always working, always swinging by the office, probably to make sure the trash cans were emptied or something," remembers Noorda's son Brent."He still doesn't like to eat out because the food is too darn expensive," he says.

Even as chairman of Novell, a multibillion-dollar company, Noorda kept a cubbyhole of an office, flew coach and frowned on extravagance by his employees.

Noorda ended his Depression years by joining the Navy in World War II and studying engineering. Later he received an engineering degree from the University of Utah and joined General Electric. In 1970, Noorda struck out on his own, forming a management consulting business that specialized in turning around troubled businesses.

In 1982, Noorda bought a majority interest in Novell Data Systems for a few hundred thousand dollars and began to divide most of his time between Novell, which was located in Utah, and Reliable Data Systems, a Unix fault-tolerance firm in California.

The development of NetWare as a product was an evolutionary process rather than a sudden bright spark, recall insiders. Development work was being contracted out to SuperSet, a group of systems programmers led by Drew Major, who is still Novell's chief scientist. Novell contracted SuperSet for six weeks to build a network of CP/M machines in the summer of 1981.

As revolutionary as PC networking was, Novell's product, called Sharenet, was not an immediate hit. It was based on a proprietary server and networking cards and was quite expensive and hard to use. The big guns in the industry at the time--IBM, Digital Equipment Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc.--were not enthusiastic endorsers of the technology.

In a sense, the narrow self-interest of the big players was Novell's biggest advantage. If PC networking was to thrive, it would have to be started by a new company with no loyalties. Or with a lot of loyalties. According to Major, Noorda correctly saw that the way to create this new market was to create a networking system that worked with everything.

"For Ray, networking implied openness and implied that everything needs to connect together--every client with every hardware adapter, everything," says Major.

A crucial step in this vision was separating the LAN software from the networking hardware servers and adapters that were on the market at that time. Noorda's vision required a myriad of partnerships and joint technology agreements. The term "co-opetition," which Noorda coined, embodied this new style of doing business where even enemies were embraced on certain projects, while they were fought aggressively on other fronts.

Noorda also saw the need to commoditize the networking space in order to grow it. In a series of deft maneuvers in the late 1980s, Novell bought networking interface card (NIC) vendors, lowered the price of the adapters and then exited the business.

"This was a big thing. A Token Ring card used to be $800," recalls Brian Sparks, president of Provo, Utah-based Caldera Inc., who once ran an advanced development team at Novell. "He achieved the purpose of reducing the cost as a barrier to entry into the market, and then he sold it off because it wasn't a strategic business," says Sparks.

Everything seemed to click when Intel 386 PCs hit the market in the late 1980s. With the magic combination of Intel hardware, DOS and Windows software, and Ethernet adapters, NetWare 386, as it was called, took off like wildfire. But it in was the channel where Noorda made his biggest mark.

Even in the early days, Noorda knew he had to leverage channel partners to combat IBM and Digital's direct-sales forces. Through a series of moves, Noorda nurtured, inculcated, wooed and cajoled a networking channel into existence. Unlike IBM or Digital, Noorda's strategy was to sell through national distributors.

"The first distributor Ray went after was Tech Data [Corp.]," says Jan Newman, a former Novell executive now at Keylabs Inc., Provo. "It was quite a chore. We spent tons of time with them trying to convince them it was a viable market," says Newman.

Novell soon began tiering its resellers. Under the direction of Jim Bills, sales vice president, the Authorized, Gold and Platinum levels became a model that the rest of the industry still follows.

Because the product was complex, Novell set about to train those VARs. It instituted the Certified NetWare Engineer (CNE) program.

The CNE credential was successful beyond Novell's wildest dreams. Novell used it as a requirement for its Gold and Platinum VARs, and VARs used it to win projects. Because Novell could not train and certify the thousands who wanted the CNE designation, it created an education channel--a thriving part of the channel today.

Novell's glory days ended around the time of Noorda's departure in 1994. Many analysts claim Noorda overreached when he bought DR-DOS, WordPerfect Corp. and Unix in a series of costly acquisitions in the early 1990s. Microsoft gained ground with Windows NT by duplicating what Novell did in some areas, notably in the channel, and improving upon what it did in other areas, like application servers.

Noorda was pressured to retire by Novell's board after he revealed some short-term memory problems in 1993.

Friends say that while Noorda does have some short-term memory problems, the main health problem he has is a slow heart.

In fact, the 73-year-old still reports to work each day as head of the Noorda Family Trust, an investment firm that mainly funds start-ups in the Utah area. "He still has the Depression-era mentality of wanting to create jobs," says a friend.