Founded in Ottawa in 1985 by Michael Cowpland, the graphics program company was bought by US firm, Vector Capital. The company had great success early in the high-tech boom of the nineties with the product CorelDRAW, which was one of the three 'killer apps' of OS/2 and became, for a time, the biggest software company in Canada. With its word processing software, WordPerfect, it hoped to be "the Pepsi to Microsoft's Coke." C'est la vie.