Just so we remember where we started........

[Bushi]

So, going through some old stuff and had a moment of nostalgia.

With our terragigibyte hard drives, enough RAM to go to mars.. and graphics cards bordering on making the sim reality.... it wasn't all that long ago... when things were different.... very very very different.

For those of us old enough to remember..

THIS is what most of us started with.. THIS was our 'flightsim' world...

We've come a long way baby!

[HorusJ]

Yep.I kinda miss my old FS4.0B days and Microprose Acrojet.

[Sascha66]

Golden days ...

[stansdds]

And we thought it was great and so cool!

[TARPSBird]

Meigs Field start, and downtown Chicago in the distance. What a long way we've come over 30+ years.

[lliaghll]

Mine was the Commodore 64 version with an orange and black screen.

[stansdds]

My first computer was a Commodore 64 too! But mine did have a color monitor. My first "real" flight sim was Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer. I was thrilled to fly the Lockheed SR-71 up to an altitude where the sky went from blue to black and there was a depiction of stars.

[jackryan172]

Here was my first sim on a ZX-81 with 16k!

[Naismith]

I started with MSFS 5.1 on PC and in some ways it was more fun & hobbyists then over today. It was almost exclusively supported by the freeware community - the Hills, Dennis Wasnich etc. I say that but it was of its time. I could not go back to 14" monitors and 486 DX2 PC's and blocky graphics. But I still look back with a fondness.
Remember tinkering endlessly with config.sys and autoexec.bat files to try and wring out the maximum usable memory, that was a joy..... NOT. There was one sim in particular that was a nightmare to get running namely TORNADO by Digital Integration, that needed almost all of the 640k and was unforgiving without it.

[Penzoil3]

I had the clunky back and white sim on a Timex Sinclair 2600 with cassette tape backup. My first real sim was Falcon 3.0, on an Intel 386 with a 100 megbyte hard drive and 2x256k ram, and a 5 inch floppy drive. LOL It was a "real" computer, after the Timex. I still have Falcon 3 on the shelf. I put the installers on CD when I still had a computer with a 3.5 floppy drive. Then I got FS 95, and shortly after that FS98 came out. Ad infinitem... been building faster computer for flight simming since '98.
LOL
Sue

[LouP]

Some of the com radios out there still look similar lol.

[txnetcop]

I went to work for Sublogic in 1978 just before the launch of Flight Simulator for Apple II after that I did QC work for the GATO submarine simulator program for Spectrum Holobyte...seems like a million years ago. I have loved the Flight Simulator series ever since. I can even remember virtual flying on a DEC PDP11 mini mainframe that got the juices flowing. Of course it didn't look anything like even Bruce's Flight Simulator, but it was fun when boredom struck.
Ted