To complete the Forest Planning process the Forest Supervisor needed to determine the Existing Visual Condition of the 13 Districts in the Mark Twain National Forest.  The effort included over 4 million acres of Federally managed and private land. 

We used Texas Instruments DS990 computers, a basic operating system, and eight inch dual floppy discs, with no hard drive.  The map combining process was two maps at a time..., to produce a third.  The resulting map was combined with perhaps the product of two other maps, etc, etc. 

The process had over 10 combining steps and 63 15 minute quad sized maps per combining step.  I do remember taking 8 months just to produce (print) the black and white maps (as composite of overstrike characters).

The Visual Quality Objectives summarys were calculated (in acres) for each of the 13 Ranger District and for the entire Mark Twain Nation Forest.   

Each District Ranger received a Forest summary and detailed map information describing the Existing Visual Condition of their District.