During the early to mid-1990s, Noorda attempted to compete directly with Microsoft by acquiring Digital Research, Unix System Laboratories, WordPerfect, and the Quattro Pro division of Borland.

[5] While future Brigham Young University professor and Eyring Research Institute (ERI) figure Dennis Fairclough was not a founder of Novell Data Systems, he did work with the company from its early days.

[2] Novell Data Systems set up offices in a former carpet warehouse located in an obscure industrial park down the road from the largely vacant Geneva Steel works.

The current or former BYU students Drew Major, Dale Neibaur, and Kyle Powell, known as the SuperSet Software group, were hired to this task and began consulting for Novell during 1981.

[15] The poor performance of Novell Data Systems resulted in losses being announced in April 1982 for the publicly-held Safeguard Scientifics and put pressure on that company's stock price.

[17] However, by this point the computer-linking work that the SuperSet group had produced was drawing considerable interest and Novell Data Systems was describing themselves as a company that made not just stand-alone microcomputers but also products for local area networking (LAN).

[22] Despite its struggles, Novell Data Systems had a presence at the COMDEX show in Las Vegas in November 1982; a man named Ray Noorda saw it and become interested in the company's potential.

Funding for the new company was still an issue, and Musser contacted two Safeguard investors and brokers, Barry Rubenstein and Fred Dolan, who were with the Cleveland brokerage house Prescott, Ball and Turben, in these efforts.

[31] Now called NetWare, the network operating system was ported to run on an IBM PC XT with an Intel 8086 processor and supported centralized, multitasking file and print services.

[21][34] In addition, the advent of the PC caused organizational changes within companies and enterprises and allowed Novell to find entryways into individual departments or regional facilities rather than having to convince upper management of the value of networking.

[14] NetWare also excelled with respect to computer security considerations, supporting user- and group-based roles and volume- and file-level access restrictions, thus making it attractive to systems administrators.

[55] But it collapsed the following month: when Lotus head Jim Manzi refused to give Novell an equal number of seats on the new board,[55] Noorda pulled out shortly before the deal would have been completed.

[35][63] There was also enmity between the two companies and the two CEOs, stemming in part from merger talks between Noorda and Microsoft head Bill Gates that had begun in 1989 and been on-and-off for the next couple of years before breaking down for good.

[64] Between 1991 and 1994, the Noorda-led Novell made this series of major acquisitions: Digital Research Inc., producer of DR-DOS, to compete with Microsoft's MS-DOS; Unix System Laboratories, holder of Unix operating system technology, to improve Novell's technology base versus Windows NT; Serius Corp., maker of an advanced application development tool; and WordPerfect Corporation and Quattro Pro from Borland to provide personal productivity and group collaboration products.

[47] By September 1993, BusinessWeek was writing, "Of the many rivalries in the personal-computer industry, for sheer nastiness it's hard to beat the one between Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc."[64] In November 1993, Noorda confirmed published reports that he had been suffering from some memory lapses and announced that he would be stepping down from the CEO position once a successor was found.

The three former Master Value Added Resellers (VARs) DataPac Australasia, Concurrent Controls[71] and Intelligent Micro Software[72] could license the source code to take over and continue independent development of their derivations in 1994.

By 1994, Corsair was a project run by Novell's advanced technology group that sought to put together a desktop metaphor with Internet connectivity and toward that end conducted research on how to better and more easily integrate and manage network access for users.

At the time, the Internet was dominated by Unix-based operating systems, but the Novell group saw the Unixes of the day as being too hardware intensive, too large, and charging too much in license fees.

They became convinced that Linux offered the best possible answer for the operating system component, and started building code towards that purpose, including contributing work on IPX networking for NetWare and Wine compatibility layer for Windows.

[85] This was followed in early 1995 by the release of UnixWare 2.0, which included full support for multiple processors as well as improved installation and ease-of-use and additional NetWare integration features.

[97] The terms of the deal between Novell and SCO, which closed in December 1995,[103] were uncertain enough that an amendment had to be signed in October 1996, and even that was not clear enough to preclude an extended battle between the two companies during the SCO-Linux disputes of the 2000s.

Many observers were surprised that Schmidt would leave his chief technical officer position at Sun Microsystems, which at the time was doing very well, to go to Novell, which was viewed as a company in real trouble.

In late September 2006 Novell announced a real-time version of SLES called "SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time" (SLERT), based on technology from Concurrent Computer Corporation.

[95] The SCO Group believed that the transfer included ownership of, and copyrights for, the source code for the Unix operating system (which they in turn claimed Linux had infringed upon).

[149][150] In contrast to the SCO case, here initial reaction from members of the free and open source software community over the patent protection was mostly critical, with expressions of concern that Novell had "sold out" and doubt that the GNU GPL would allow distribution of code, including the Linux kernel, under this exclusive agreement.

[151][152][153] In a letter to the FOSS development community on 9 November 2006, Bradley M. Kuhn, CTO of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), described the agreement as "worse than useless".

[164] Among the more skeptical was Dan Kusnetzky of ZDNet, who wrote that Novell "clearly hopes that putting its products together in new ways and invoking today's catch phrases and buzz words will appear fresh and new.

As part of the deal, 882 patents owned by Novell were sold to CPTN Holdings LLC, a consortium of companies led by Microsoft and including Apple, EMC, and Oracle.

[174] The U.S. Department of Justice announced that, as originally proposed, the deal with CPTN would jeopardize the ability of open source software, such as Linux, to continue to innovate and compete in the development and distribution of server, desktop, and mobile operating systems, middleware, and virtualization products; to address the department's antitrust concerns, CPTN and its owners had altered their original agreement: With the acquisition, Novell's headquarters were moved back to Provo.

[50] During April and May 2011, The Attachmate Group announced layoffs for the Novell workforce, including hundreds of employees from the Provo location,[176][175] raising questions about the future of some open source projects such as Mono.