It was invented by computer journalist David D. Busch, and billed as the "world's leading supplier of fictitious hardware, software, firmware, and limpware".
The fictional company's flagship product was the TLS-8E, a computer which was sold with a factory-applied coating of oxidation on its peripheral edge card connectors ("to protect them from electricity"), a 53⁄8-inch "sloppy" disk drive, and a keyboard that eschewed the familiar QWERTY array for a 16-key matrix that included a TBA (To Be Announced) key.
Hollerith, it was said, graduated from the University of California at Phoenix in 1970 with a degree in Slide Rule Design, and quickly built KTI into a multi-thousand-dollar empire on a foundation of selling maintenance upgrades for DROSS-DOS 8E, a microcomputer operating system that was a subset of CP/M.
Although not as pointed as the classic The Devil's DP Dictionary by Stan Kelly-Bootle, the book, and the Kitchen Table International columns it was largely based upon, poked fun at the foibles of companies like Apple Computer, Radio Shack, Commodore, and Atari in an era when the early computer magazines were filled with technical articles, code listings, and discussions of the latest and greatest hardware, and not much regular humor.
When the KTI column ceased publication in July, 1983, Busch collected all the existing material, reorganized it by topic, and wrote new pieces to produce Sorry About The Explosion!.