Beginning in 1985, Apple Computer, Inc. and several school districts began a collaboration to examine the impact of intensive computer use on instruction and learning in K-12 classrooms. This paper follows the development of a Macintosh II-based management and retrieval system for text data undertaken to store and retrieve oral reflections of teacher participants in the Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow (ACOT) project. The effort was conceived as an open-ended and multiple-year inquiry that had to remain entirely flexible to meet researchers' evolving questions. A text-retrieval and analysis system developed earlier by the same team on a minicomputer and required the employment of a full-time programmer. The current effort, conceived specifically for use on a personal computer, is an attempt to keep the entire process in the hands of the research team. Although a highly efficient data management and retrieval system evolved, the data set is developing proportions that challenge state-of-the art personal computer technology. Suggestions about future directions for both the management and analysis of large qualitative data are made. Five appendixes making up about half the document are included. Appendix A contains reporting instructions and examples for the participating teachers; Appendixes B, C, and D contain tape document forms; and theme and category definitions are presented in Appendix E. (Contains 22 references.) (Author/ALF)