Publishers
Publisher Information and Releases
Totl Software
USA
TOTL Software Ltd.
PO Box 84
Lopez Island, WA 98261
USA
Year Founded: 1982
Year Defunct: 1986
Direct from the founders:
TOTL Software was founded by Ann Palmer and Chuck McCarty (we were both Palmer-McCarty then) in 1982 in Walnut Creek, CA. I studied computer science before it was even called that at the University of Michigan, when programming was done on paper tape and punch cards for machines that filled a room but had not much more capability than a VIC-20. When we started the company, I was working for Pacific Telephone (then part of AT&T before it was broken up) managing about 50 system programmers in 3 large mainframe data centers throughout California. I started writing software for the VIC-20 and later the Commodore 64 in my spare time. As a programmer, I missed the challenge and fun of writing because I was in a completely management position.
The first program was TOTL Research Assistant, which I wrote to help Chuck manage his research data (he was working on research for a book based on Vietnam war experiences at the time). He told the local computer store what I was doing, and they said show us. At the time, there were no practical programs for the VIC-20 and Commodore 64 at all. The professional in me did not want to give them a handwritten document, so I wrote a little word-processing program to document Research Assistant. Commodore had just come out with a printer, but there was no paper available for it and it was a narrow format. So we got some 8.5 x 11, fan-fold paper, cut it to size and used a hand drill to drill the sprocket holes! When Chuck took the documentation printed on the Commodore printer to the computer store, they were more interested in how we had done the documentation than the program! So, I polished up what became TOTL Text and it became our first commercial product and the first word processor available for the VIC-20. Later we produced a version for C64. We made cassette tapes with the BASIC code, printed manuals, and put it all in plastic baggies at our kitchen table.
We also packaged up TOTL Research Assistant, and then followed with an address list and label maker called TOTL Label, also first written to help us manage our own mailing lists.
The demand for these programs was amazing, and pretty soon we had to hire help to keep up and I quit my job with Pacific Telephone in order to be able to develop software full time.
As time progressed, we began to compile the programs (to protect the BASIC source code) and even tried various security schemes to prevent piracy, including an abortive attempt to make the manuals hard to copy by printing with blue ink on yellow paper (our customers hated them!) When Commodore came out with a floppy disk drive, it opened up a lot more possibilities. I wasn't happy with the speed of the drive access, so I wrote an indexed sequential access method (ISAM) for the disk in a combination of BASIC and 6502 assembler and we used that database code as the basis for TOTL Database Management and also a full set of business software: Accounts Receivable, Payable, and General Ledger called TOTL Business. TOTL Time Manager was another release, after I had hired an additional programmer.
In 1982 and 1983, the demand for our software was incredible. We sold a half million dollars of software! We outgrew our kitchen table and opened an office with up to 10 employees. We professionalized the packaging and contracted with a local agency hiring the disabled to do the packaging and shipping. We also developed a regular newsletter for our customers and continued with our rather campy and humorous approach to packaging and advertising. Our logo was a cartoon chick, skillfully drawn by a local artist. The secret of the name, TOTL, was that it was an acronym for Tuna O' The Land, a phrase derived from an early Firesign Theater comedy album.
During this period we allowed our sense of humor to run away with us, and we developed and offered through our newsletter a novelty pillow, about 16" square, that we called the One Megabyte Fuzzy Diskette. (One megabyte was a fantasy goal in home computers at the time, where 128K was a big deal!) It looked kind of like a large plush floppy diskette, with a big red 'bite' out of one corner. It was accompanied by "documentation" that consisted of the chick in cartoon form as a mechanic putting it in a giant machine press ("Do not fold"), firing an arrow at it ("Do not spindle") Cutting it with an axe ("Do not mutilate"), and finally acting out the scene "Do not put it in an old car and push it over a cliff". We discovered that, for the most part, the industry and customers had no sense of humor. One caller took it very seriously, and thought it was a real product. He wanted to know how to format one, and was advised by our tech person that he had to sit on it for about 15 minutes to achieve formatting. He was not amused when finally advised it was really only a pillow!
We made the rounds of Comdex and CES shows in 1982 and 1983, sometimes as a visitor and sometimes as an exhibitor. At one of the shows in Las Vegas a cabbie lamented that the personal computer folks weren't much into gambling. We just laughed and laughed, which just confused him (most of the people there were gambling their personal fortunes!) We also watched a really grim-faced Las Vegas cop stop, berate and ticket an exhibitor who was using his robot to carry his luggage for him, in the street since the wheeled device couldn't handle the curbs. No sense of humor there, either.
By the end of 1983, the bubble was starting to burst. Suddenly, because of the popularity of the Commodore 64, we were competing with large publishing houses like Simon and Schuster. We could not keep up with them in terms of packaging and advertising. We made overtures to Broderbund and a venture capitalist to try to expand and survive, but to no avail. The industry was rapidly changing. The Commodore 64 was being sold in Toys 'R Us, and the IBM PC and Apple II were taking over the personal computer market as the serious machines, as they were compared to the Atari products.
Drawing on our base of loyal fans, we continued to sell through our newsletter and small ads in computer magazines, but it was hard to attract new customers. In 1984 we were forced to close our offices and lay off all our employees. We were back to the kitchen table and doing mostly mail orders. So we decided to sell our house in Walnut Creek (which allowed us to pay off bank loans) and in November 1984 we moved to Lopez Island, WA, a small island in the San Juan Islands archipelago - almost to the Canadian border. We continued to publish our newsletter and do mail order sales until 1986, when it just didn't make sense any more. We continued to receive letters from people using the software and asking for upgrades for years. About six months after we unplugged the TOTL Software phone, a local Sheriff's Deputy showed up to do a welfare check on us--a concerned loyal customer had contacted them when we dropped out of sight, to make sure we hadn't drowned or something!
I went to work for software companies in the Seattle area, while still living on Lopez Island, doing a weekly commute and maintaining an apartment in the city. Chuck tried his hand at being a sawyer and forestry consultant and building things out of wood. We built a house on our 30 acres that is almost completely built with wood that he milled from trees on our property. We have a daughter who is now 21. In 1994 we went our separate ways. In 1999 I got the bug again and was involved in several startup companies building internet and web applications. Then the dot-com bubble burst and by 2002 the last one folded and I ended up going back to contract work. I lived in Seattle with my daughter until 2003, when we returned to Lopez Island so she could go to high school here. Since then I have been building websites and other projects for local small businesses. Chuck got a job with the Sheriff's Office and moved to Friday Harbor on a neighboring island, and continues to teach the martial art, Aikido, he has studied for 36 years.
In many ways, TOTL software was a real success story. We tried to stay small and did not expand to new platforms, and the decision and financial inability to follow that path ultimately contributed to our demise. We learned a lot about business and marketing (and a lot of things not to do), but all in all we had a great time and it was truly a wild ride!
Products:
TOTL Text
TOTL Label
TOTL Research Assistant
TOTL Database Management (was there an Info Master product?)
TOTL Time Manager
TOTL Business
Ann Palmer
December 2010
PO Box 84
Lopez Island, WA 98261
USA
Year Founded: 1982
Year Defunct: 1986
Direct from the founders:
TOTL Software was founded by Ann Palmer and Chuck McCarty (we were both Palmer-McCarty then) in 1982 in Walnut Creek, CA. I studied computer science before it was even called that at the University of Michigan, when programming was done on paper tape and punch cards for machines that filled a room but had not much more capability than a VIC-20. When we started the company, I was working for Pacific Telephone (then part of AT&T before it was broken up) managing about 50 system programmers in 3 large mainframe data centers throughout California. I started writing software for the VIC-20 and later the Commodore 64 in my spare time. As a programmer, I missed the challenge and fun of writing because I was in a completely management position.
The first program was TOTL Research Assistant, which I wrote to help Chuck manage his research data (he was working on research for a book based on Vietnam war experiences at the time). He told the local computer store what I was doing, and they said show us. At the time, there were no practical programs for the VIC-20 and Commodore 64 at all. The professional in me did not want to give them a handwritten document, so I wrote a little word-processing program to document Research Assistant. Commodore had just come out with a printer, but there was no paper available for it and it was a narrow format. So we got some 8.5 x 11, fan-fold paper, cut it to size and used a hand drill to drill the sprocket holes! When Chuck took the documentation printed on the Commodore printer to the computer store, they were more interested in how we had done the documentation than the program! So, I polished up what became TOTL Text and it became our first commercial product and the first word processor available for the VIC-20. Later we produced a version for C64. We made cassette tapes with the BASIC code, printed manuals, and put it all in plastic baggies at our kitchen table.
We also packaged up TOTL Research Assistant, and then followed with an address list and label maker called TOTL Label, also first written to help us manage our own mailing lists.
The demand for these programs was amazing, and pretty soon we had to hire help to keep up and I quit my job with Pacific Telephone in order to be able to develop software full time.
As time progressed, we began to compile the programs (to protect the BASIC source code) and even tried various security schemes to prevent piracy, including an abortive attempt to make the manuals hard to copy by printing with blue ink on yellow paper (our customers hated them!) When Commodore came out with a floppy disk drive, it opened up a lot more possibilities. I wasn't happy with the speed of the drive access, so I wrote an indexed sequential access method (ISAM) for the disk in a combination of BASIC and 6502 assembler and we used that database code as the basis for TOTL Database Management and also a full set of business software: Accounts Receivable, Payable, and General Ledger called TOTL Business. TOTL Time Manager was another release, after I had hired an additional programmer.
In 1982 and 1983, the demand for our software was incredible. We sold a half million dollars of software! We outgrew our kitchen table and opened an office with up to 10 employees. We professionalized the packaging and contracted with a local agency hiring the disabled to do the packaging and shipping. We also developed a regular newsletter for our customers and continued with our rather campy and humorous approach to packaging and advertising. Our logo was a cartoon chick, skillfully drawn by a local artist. The secret of the name, TOTL, was that it was an acronym for Tuna O' The Land, a phrase derived from an early Firesign Theater comedy album.
During this period we allowed our sense of humor to run away with us, and we developed and offered through our newsletter a novelty pillow, about 16" square, that we called the One Megabyte Fuzzy Diskette. (One megabyte was a fantasy goal in home computers at the time, where 128K was a big deal!) It looked kind of like a large plush floppy diskette, with a big red 'bite' out of one corner. It was accompanied by "documentation" that consisted of the chick in cartoon form as a mechanic putting it in a giant machine press ("Do not fold"), firing an arrow at it ("Do not spindle") Cutting it with an axe ("Do not mutilate"), and finally acting out the scene "Do not put it in an old car and push it over a cliff". We discovered that, for the most part, the industry and customers had no sense of humor. One caller took it very seriously, and thought it was a real product. He wanted to know how to format one, and was advised by our tech person that he had to sit on it for about 15 minutes to achieve formatting. He was not amused when finally advised it was really only a pillow!
We made the rounds of Comdex and CES shows in 1982 and 1983, sometimes as a visitor and sometimes as an exhibitor. At one of the shows in Las Vegas a cabbie lamented that the personal computer folks weren't much into gambling. We just laughed and laughed, which just confused him (most of the people there were gambling their personal fortunes!) We also watched a really grim-faced Las Vegas cop stop, berate and ticket an exhibitor who was using his robot to carry his luggage for him, in the street since the wheeled device couldn't handle the curbs. No sense of humor there, either.
By the end of 1983, the bubble was starting to burst. Suddenly, because of the popularity of the Commodore 64, we were competing with large publishing houses like Simon and Schuster. We could not keep up with them in terms of packaging and advertising. We made overtures to Broderbund and a venture capitalist to try to expand and survive, but to no avail. The industry was rapidly changing. The Commodore 64 was being sold in Toys 'R Us, and the IBM PC and Apple II were taking over the personal computer market as the serious machines, as they were compared to the Atari products.
Drawing on our base of loyal fans, we continued to sell through our newsletter and small ads in computer magazines, but it was hard to attract new customers. In 1984 we were forced to close our offices and lay off all our employees. We were back to the kitchen table and doing mostly mail orders. So we decided to sell our house in Walnut Creek (which allowed us to pay off bank loans) and in November 1984 we moved to Lopez Island, WA, a small island in the San Juan Islands archipelago - almost to the Canadian border. We continued to publish our newsletter and do mail order sales until 1986, when it just didn't make sense any more. We continued to receive letters from people using the software and asking for upgrades for years. About six months after we unplugged the TOTL Software phone, a local Sheriff's Deputy showed up to do a welfare check on us--a concerned loyal customer had contacted them when we dropped out of sight, to make sure we hadn't drowned or something!
I went to work for software companies in the Seattle area, while still living on Lopez Island, doing a weekly commute and maintaining an apartment in the city. Chuck tried his hand at being a sawyer and forestry consultant and building things out of wood. We built a house on our 30 acres that is almost completely built with wood that he milled from trees on our property. We have a daughter who is now 21. In 1994 we went our separate ways. In 1999 I got the bug again and was involved in several startup companies building internet and web applications. Then the dot-com bubble burst and by 2002 the last one folded and I ended up going back to contract work. I lived in Seattle with my daughter until 2003, when we returned to Lopez Island so she could go to high school here. Since then I have been building websites and other projects for local small businesses. Chuck got a job with the Sheriff's Office and moved to Friday Harbor on a neighboring island, and continues to teach the martial art, Aikido, he has studied for 36 years.
In many ways, TOTL software was a real success story. We tried to stay small and did not expand to new platforms, and the decision and financial inability to follow that path ultimately contributed to our demise. We learned a lot about business and marketing (and a lot of things not to do), but all in all we had a great time and it was truly a wild ride!
Products:
TOTL Text
TOTL Label
TOTL Research Assistant
TOTL Database Management (was there an Info Master product?)
TOTL Time Manager
TOTL Business
Ann Palmer
December 2010