Goodbye, Uncle Ray

I started working at Novell on October 30, 1992. When I began working there, we had four buildings on our Provo campus and you could pretty much at least recognize almost everybody working there. I started out as a building technician who ran around helping folks with problems they had with their desktop computers. My expertise was in MacIntosh since I was a repair person for those computers and that was my focus...keeping the Macs working with everything else.

When I began working was right towards the end of Novell's small-business atmosphere. When I started, Ray Noorda (Uncle Ray) still went around to new hires and introduced himself. That ended right around the time I started, but Uncle Ray worked very hard to promote this company as one big family.

A lot of people just see him as a successful businessman, but Ray Noorda did a lot more than that. Because he was a man of integrity and he ran Novell with integrity, there are a lot of folk living in Utah County today with mortgages paid off because of the work they were able to do at Novell.

Because of the way he ran Novell, I found myself able to move from building technician to server operator over to tech support through three levels there and then move over to engineering where now I'm a Senior Software Engineer on the NetWare Core OS. All of that is at least partially owed to Ray for the way he structured Novell and his thought that anybody can do it if they just try hard enough. And he rewarded hard work.

Now, after a fight against alzheimers he has passed away. We'll miss you, Ray. Thanks for the opportunities you made available to me and my family.