Ray Noorda, who died yesterday at 82, was an electrical engineer before the era of the silicon chip who led Novell Inc. in developing the first successful way of connecting large number of computers without costly mainframes.

A resourceful businessman who had led several corporate turnarounds before entering to the computer industry, Noorda somewhat quixotically battled Microsoft for control of the personal computer desktop in the early 1990s, and urged the government to pursue an antitrust investigation.

As a leader in developing models for marketing computer hardware, software, and services, Noorda is credited with pioneering “coopetition,” in which companies in the same market develop open standards. After leaving Novell in 1995, Noorda founded Canopy Group, a venture capital firm that invested in companies developing the open-source operating system Linux.

Noorda grew up in rural Ogden, Utah, the son of Mormon immigrants. A child of the Depression, he worked as a pin boy, cherry picker, and sheepherder to supplement his family’s income. After serving in the Navy during World War II, he studied engineering at the University of Utah, and after graduating in 1949 took a job as an electrical engineer with General Electric.

During two decades at GE, Noorda became a regional manager and masterminded several startups within the company. In 1970, he left to became CEO of Boschert, a troubled powersupply manufacturer in Fremont, Calif. He turned the company around, a trick he accomplished twice more in the coming decade at California firms Systems Industries and General Automation. He liked to call himself an “itinerant president.”

In 1983, he was invited to become president of Novell Data Systems, a nearly bankrupt, 17-employee firm in Orem, Utah. He purchased a third of the company for just less than $1.5 million, an investment that helped make him a billionaire within a decade.

At Novell, he reoriented what had been primarily a peripherals manufacturer into a company that created the first widely used solution to the problem of connecting the personal computers that proliferated on corporate desks during the 1980s. Previously, the only way computers could be connected was through high-cost mainframes, and the technology for accomplishing this was arcane. Novell Netware was a networking solution for hundreds of thousands of computers, although those who worked with it in the late 1980s will remember its quirks.

To help deal with such complexity, Noorda helped pioneer certification programs for network engineers that became the model for other kinds of computer technicians’ certifications. He also created alliances between manufacturers and resellers that became models for cooperation for the entire computer industry.

Under Noorda’s leadership in the early 1990s, Novell acquired a number of also-ran desktop software brands, including WordPerfect and Quattro-Pro, a spreadsheet. The project came to nothing as Microsoft leveraged its dominance of operating system software into near-dominance of the desktop, even as antitrust investigations were undertaken. The Noorda feud with Microsoft’s Bill Gates became the stuff of Silicon Valley legend.

Noorda left Novell amid a slip in the company’s stock price in 1995 and founded Canopy Group. He sold his shares in Novell after the company abandoned its open-source initiative in 1996. He invested in Caldera Systems, an early commercial Linux firm. Ironically, Novell has embraced open-source technology in recent years while Caldera, renamed SCO, brought lawsuits to protect patents it claims on Linux, according to industry watcher Steven J.Vaughan-Nichols. The lawsuits, some still pending, according to a spokesman for Novell, came at a time when the Alzheimer’s-stricken Noorda had withdrawn from day-to-day operations of his venture capital fund, Mr. Vaughan-Nichols says.

Although once labeled by Mr. Gates a “grumpy grandfather,” associates paint a different picture of a man who supported Mormon genealogical research, sang “A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief” a cappella during church functions, and was a gifted whistler.

Raymond John Noorda

Born June 19, 1924, in Ogden, Utah; died October 9 after suffering for several years from Alzheimer’s disease; survived by his wife of 56 years, Tye, four children, and 13 grandchildren.