Post by Sandy on Jul 14, 2015 23:33:41 GMT -5
I got into flight simming a little after most of you. My first foray came after a local scale modeling club session at the Virginia Science Museum. When the group of us came out of the room we had reserved for our monthly meeting, the folks working there were setting up a flight simulator for demonstration. It was simply an old computer (very likely one of those 8086 or 8088 powered gems) and flying a gray scale version of the wire frame SubLogic Flight simulator. As soon as the guys had it hooked up, I asked them to show me how to fly it. They were more than happy to give me a lesson right then and there.
My scale modeling friends were quickly bored (I was one of the few who modeled aircraft in the club at the time, most were into armor and automobiles) and left me to enjoy the flight simulator. After a couple hours I had to go, but I was hooked. But when they explained the setup I was flying on cost several thousand dollars, my enthusiasm was dampened. This would have been around 1989.
Fast forward a couple years, and I found the means to re-investigate those computer things... with the sole intent of flying on it. A couple friends of mine were doing adventure games on one, in glorious 16 color graphics. After saving my pennies for a few months, I visited the only place in town that I could think of that had electronics: Radio Shack. $1800 later, I had a brand new Tandy 1000 (with the new and super-powerful Intel 80286-10mhz processor!) Two days later I came back and spent another $200 on a 20mb hard drive, and a licensed copy of Microsoft MSDos 3.0. That Tandy operating system didn't last past three boot-ups. It was crap-tastic!
I needed all that storage on the new hard drive to install Flight Simulator. Then I discovered I needed something called "expanded memory" ... another $100 and several hours spent inserting little memory chips onto the expanded memory board, then wrestling with the boot up files: config.sys and autoexec.bat. But the first time I got my single pole joystick to work in FS I was ecstatic. Miegs Field in Chicago was the closest thing to Minnesota, so I always flew from there.
Then... the internet. I was bitten, and my wife knew it. She got me a second phone line for my birthday! Then I discovered virtual combat online, and my days of bouncing off downtown Chicago's buildings came to a close. Over the years I kept up with what was now MS FS, until the current iteration under new management and development at Lockheed Martin.
My scale modeling friends were quickly bored (I was one of the few who modeled aircraft in the club at the time, most were into armor and automobiles) and left me to enjoy the flight simulator. After a couple hours I had to go, but I was hooked. But when they explained the setup I was flying on cost several thousand dollars, my enthusiasm was dampened. This would have been around 1989.
Fast forward a couple years, and I found the means to re-investigate those computer things... with the sole intent of flying on it. A couple friends of mine were doing adventure games on one, in glorious 16 color graphics. After saving my pennies for a few months, I visited the only place in town that I could think of that had electronics: Radio Shack. $1800 later, I had a brand new Tandy 1000 (with the new and super-powerful Intel 80286-10mhz processor!) Two days later I came back and spent another $200 on a 20mb hard drive, and a licensed copy of Microsoft MSDos 3.0. That Tandy operating system didn't last past three boot-ups. It was crap-tastic!
I needed all that storage on the new hard drive to install Flight Simulator. Then I discovered I needed something called "expanded memory" ... another $100 and several hours spent inserting little memory chips onto the expanded memory board, then wrestling with the boot up files: config.sys and autoexec.bat. But the first time I got my single pole joystick to work in FS I was ecstatic. Miegs Field in Chicago was the closest thing to Minnesota, so I always flew from there.
Then... the internet. I was bitten, and my wife knew it. She got me a second phone line for my birthday! Then I discovered virtual combat online, and my days of bouncing off downtown Chicago's buildings came to a close. Over the years I kept up with what was now MS FS, until the current iteration under new management and development at Lockheed Martin.
