Alan Ashton was a magna cum laude in mathematics graduate drawn to the University of Utah's brand-new computer science department as a graduate student shortly after it was created by professor David C. Evans, who died in October, in the early 1960s.
Ivan Sutherland, the "father of computer graphics" following the development of his "sketchpad" graphic system at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, brought his technology background to the U. and joined Evans in Evans & Sutherland, a company born while executing a $5 million defense contract.Ashton earned his doctorate and joined the U. faculty, experimenting with a computer-music system that would play the organ when he joined the faculty of Brigham Young University, where his focus shifted from music to word processing. WordPerfect, the flagship product from the company he founded in 1979 with former student Bruce Bastian, would become the best-selling personal computer software by 1986. Ashton continued as WordPerfect's president and CEO until 1993. WordPerfect was sold to Novell Inc. in 1994 and to Corel Corp. in 1996.
Ashton responded to Deseret News questions about Utah's technology landscape as he, Sutherland and Evans are chosen with former Novell CEO Raymond J. Noorda and the father of television, the late Philo T. Farnsworth, to be the inaugural members of Utah's technology Hall of Fame.
Question: When WordPerfect was at the starting gate, what conditions existed along the Wasatch Front to make Utah a fertile place to grow in such a new industry?
Answer: "I think a big factor was Dave Evans and Ivan Sutherland coming to the University of Utah and setting up the graphics department there that became world famous. It is hard to really estimate the impact that had in the computer industry because there were so many bright, young students who left there and went to other places, starting companies like Silicon Graphics and Adobe." Evans & Sutherland also created an entrepreneurial spirit. "Novell was another early startup company; Iomega in northern Utah, then WordPerfect.
"One of the graduate students while we were at the University of Utah had his own consulting firm, consulting as he was going to school, and a few of us did some consulting for him, so we got an introduction to early computer work even while we were students under Dave Evans."
"There were so many pioneers at the University of Utah. That had a great impact then. There were a number of young Ph.D. graduates of that program who went on to teach there or at Utah State or BYU," he said.
Question: What conditions at the time created speed bumps?
Answer: WordPerfect was still trying to define the market when it incorporated in 1979, three years before personal computers would enter the market in 1982. Business firms large enough to have computers had separate computer systems for processing data and word processing. WordPerfect's challenge was creating the software and mind-set to do all of the work on one computer. "We would tell people, 'You have your data on the data processing machines, so do your word processing there, too.' " WordPerfect then had to pare down a mature word processing program developed for minicomputers and make it sing on the first PCs, which could perform only one task at a time, and then adapt WordPerfect to work with the variety of consumer-oriented computers running different operating systems.
Finding development capital was a challenge. "We were fortunate that we had capital coming in from our first minicomputer software that helped us."
Question: Imagine you are in a board meeting in 1985, reporting your observations from time travel to 1999. What would you tell the board about what you saw?
Answer: "I would tell them we had a lot of things right." Innovators knew then computers would get smaller and faster, "but we didn't realize at the time it would continue on the exponential curve that people were talking about -- every year and a half the size was being cut in half and the amount of memory you could store in a given space was doubling."
"In my little Palm Pilot, I have 8 megs (of data storage). When I began programming the organ project we had a monstrous machine the size of a refrigerator-freezer combination that had only 6K -- 6,000 bytes of memory and now I have 8 million in my pocket."
Text documents are now multimedia documents with sound icons and hypertext links to the Internet and video files. Programs run on hand-held computers with digital cameras on board. "I would have taken one of those devices and shown it to the board and said 'This is what the future will look like, and this is what will happen to our word processor.' "
"In the early days we were trying to control line printers that only printed uppercase, so it would have been something to tell them about computers that would allow color and movies and pictures and sound and multiple type fonts and beautiful graphics."
Ashton said he was laughed at when he predicted in 1982 that word processing software would push spreadsheets out of their best-seller spot for PC software. "Then in 1986 WordPerfect became the top-selling application for personal computers." Ashton said he predicted in the late 1980s that electronic mail and information exchange over computer networks would outpace the popularity of word processing. "That came about much more quickly than I thought it would with the Internet catching on and just becoming a phenomenon that now everybody uses," he said. "That would be a phenomenon I would tell the board about."
Question: Back to the present, what developing areas of the information technology industry do you find the most intriguing?
Answer: "They have to do with the extension of what has happened in the areas of computers helping people do things." In music, writing, education, medicine, financial transactions, commerce, family research and finding, filtering and prioritizing information -- "It comes down to network availability and sharing of information."
"There is exciting media through which to send education throughout the world," he said. "The other thing I'm interested in is creating a safe environment on the Internet where people can productively and safely communicate and share information in an environment that is suitable for children and others with values where a lot of the degrading and base things are kept away."