"In 1975, I finished up in Lynbrook High School in the mornings, and attended DeAnza Junior college in the evenings. In the afternoons and following school, I worked at NASA-Ames Flight Systems Navigation (FSN) branch for Leonard McGee, who loaned me out at times to various projects.

Leonard was working on an elaborate program called VSTOLAND, which was involved with the XV-15 Tilt Rotor program. A simulation of the navigational software that would combine inertial guidance and VOR/DME navigational aids, its Kalman Filtering would be subtracting out modeled error for a better fix. Numerical glitches in floating point often created interesting surprises in the statistics used to do this, so going from a IBM 360 (base 16 exponent) to a CDC 7600 (binary exponent) had interesting effects in the numbers.

One of the interesting aspects of NASA at the time was the variety of programming environments, hardware, noemenclature, vendors, etc. Nothing was the same. Assembly languages, Fortran, Basic, each machine a different variation, whith different roundoff errors and other quirks. Often the errors propogated into the results.

The ArpaNet was present to go accross the country, but on campus it was serial networking, without file transport, and often 1200/2400 baud.