Ernie Tolin began his Forest Service career working as a labor II air service manager at the Chino airport in California. He moved on to a 40,000 acre helicopter seeding project on the San Dimas Experimental Forest. From there, he was transferred to the new Forest Fire Laboratory in Riverside California. There, he would work on fire research projects, fight fires and eventually, he would learn how to program computers. Ernie wrote an automated Fire Dispatch program and a computer mapping system that would allow researchers to simulate Forest fires and fire spread models.

Ernie was...