Spiral Software's history begins back in 1986. A (then) young man named Stuart Karon finished his Masters degree in computer science at Brown University and took a job at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. A few months into the job, he began writing a fast, simple-to-use graphing program to help Lab researchers plot and analyze data. A year later, Laboratory staff began using EasyPlot and over the next two years, EasyPlot grew and became very popular.
In 1989, Stuart licensed his EasyPlot software from MIT and founded Spiral Software. For eight years, Stuart enhanced EasyPlot while overseeing Spiral's marketing and sales operations.
In 1997, Stuart handed the sales and marketing of EasyPlot to another company. Free of marketing concerns, Stuart had time to watch his wife, Jodi, fill his desk with papers and eraser shavings. Jodi was assembling call schedules for her pediatric residency program. Like chief residents around the country, she had only primitive tools to aid her task. When done with each month's schedule, she'd enter it into Excel to print presentable copies. Call scheduling for a single month consumed around ten hours of her time.
Stuart sensed Jodi's silent plea for help and began working on a piece of software that would make call scheduling easier. Six months later, Jodi began using Stuart's software called OnCall. In few more months, it had all the features she needed. She quickly completed the call schedules for the balance of her chief year and had more time to devote to medicine and resident training.
By 1999 OnCall was a mature program equipped to schedule any size or type of residency program. Stuart started up a web-publishing service at amion.com where staff could view their schedules online. This became very popular with residents, many of whom know OnCall as "Am I On?"
Jodi is a full-time pediatrician, and Stuart continues to add new features to OnCall. In 2000, Carol Cumming, who represented Spiral Software in Europe, moved to the US and trains and supports OnCall users. In 2001 Stuart added many features for the growing number of attendings and hospitalists who use OnCall.
In 2003 Spiral Software released OnCall Enterprise to help hospitals produce on-call contact lists direct from department schedules. In 2006 many hospitals use OnCall Enterprise for hospital-wide scheduling and to page on-call staff.
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