With the ongoing development of the Conviron CMP3000 environmental control system, Vansco needed someone to develop software. I stepped up and was asked to develop a floating point math package to support the control algorithms. It worked! With minor bug fixes, it was in service for the next 15+ years.
At that time, the development system was the huge and heavy Motorola Exorciser II, which Vansco had bought surplus when Interdiscom had shut down. The Exorciser was a card-cage based system, similar to an S-100 bus system (but not the same), which was comprised of the huge main chassis, a huge, solid and heavy dual 8 inch floppy drive chassis, and an ExorTerm display.
The display could only show upppercase characters. The operating system was MDOS 3.11, a Motorola-specific O/S. Editing was done in a line editor called EDLIN, or, if you happened to have a lot of time, a full screen editor called EDIT. Argh, the system was slow! Programming was performed in MC6800 macro assembly language, RASM, and in MPL, a PL/I-like high level language that very few have heard of.