Asymetrix ToolBook

» see toolbook.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

asymetrix toolbook was still on sale in december 2021. i want to start there, because that is the part that is hard to believe. a windows authoring tool from 1990, written as a direct answer to hypercard, was still taking money and issuing activations thirty-one years later. then on the last day of 2021 it stopped.

i did not use it. i have no memory of ever watching it run, and the world it lived in, corporate training departments buying courseware tools by purchase order, is one i have stayed outside of for an entire career. this one is built from documents.

paul allen set asymetrix up in 1984 through vulcan ventures, out of bellevue, washington. this was allen's post-microsoft stretch and asymetrix was the software company in it. toolbook 1.0 came out in 1990, timed against windows 3.0, and the comparison every reviewer reached for straight away was hypercard.

the comparison was fair. a toolbook file was a book and its screens were pages. you built by putting objects onto a page and attaching script to them, in a language called openscript that was object-oriented and event-driven and read closely enough like hypertalk that people crossed over without much retraining. what it had over hypercard was that it ran on the operating system most of the world was about to be using.

the thing i take from this at a distance is the shape of the survival. hypercard was the famous one and apple stopped selling it in march 2004. toolbook was the copy, on the uglier platform, and it outlasted the original by seventeen years by staying useful to people who were never romantic about it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the four names ~

asymetrix went public in june 1998 and raised about thirty-one million dollars. in october 1999 it renamed itself click2learn.com, which tells you exactly what year it was and exactly where the money had gone. click2learn later merged with docent, a mountain view e-learning company founded in 1997, and on 18 march 2004 the combined business took the name sumtotal systems.

sumtotal then got bought repeatedly. vista equity partners took it private in may 2009 for a hundred and sixty million dollars, and skillsoft bought it in september 2014. cornerstone ondemand completed its own acquisition on 25 august 2022, eight months after toolbook had already been switched off. by the end the product sat four owners deep and nobody buying the company was buying it for toolbook.

~ the day it died ~

sumtotal ended all sales and support of toolbook on 31 december 2021. the notice carried one line that matters more than the rest of it: this also ended the ability to activate toolbook installations on new computers. that is not a product going out of print. that is every remaining copy becoming non-transferable on the same afternoon. if the machine dies, the software dies with it. the last version, 11.5, dates from 2012 and was never going to be followed by another.

the date says something by not saying anything. nothing happened to toolbook on 31 december 2021. it is a fiscal year end. the product was retired the way a line item is retired.

~ what remains ~

toolbook's real inheritance is not a piece of software, it is a job. the person who assembles an interactive lesson out of screens and buttons, and never writes an application to do it, is doing work whose shape toolbook and authorware settled in the early nineties.

that job did not go anywhere when the tools did. it moved into the browser and into whatever the current learning management system will accept, and the work looks very nearly identical thirty years on. the tool died. the working day it invented is still on somebody's calendar this morning.

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