How many flight simming years

[CowlFlapsOpen]

Since about 1987 (when my son was born--flew while rocking him). Every version since 3.0. Took a break tho from about 1990 to 1995. Had to. I get so
addicted I was in danger of not finishing my Ph.D. Had to go cold turkey, as they say.

[SaVas]

FS9 was my first general simulator, but I had been combat simming since the mid 90s. Now I never combat sim, only FS9 for me

[WBHoenig]

The only times I combat sim is when using free GNU little combat sims avalible on the internet so I can see how their graphics stack up to FS. My
conclusion: I'd be banned from this forum if I elucidated too much on the difference.

[AKLupine]

Way Back in the "Dar Ages" of the mid '80s the flight simming bug bit me. Started out with v3.0 for my Amiga 1000. If I'm doing the math correctly
it would put it at early 1988.

[jaws1948]

Started in 1986 with SubLogic Flight Simulator 2.0 on the Commodore 64. When I see screenshots of that program, I can't believe how far
we've come. BTW, the best part of those early Flight Sims was the WW1 dogfight game, IMHO. I used to fly that little biplane for hours.
Best part was you could never shoot them all down. When you got them all, new ones appeared. Spent many hours limping back to the
base for repairs and more ammo.

Mike

[CowlFlapsOpen]

What I remember most about the early days was the almost complete lack of scenery. Blue for water, brown for land (as i recall). And, us old timers
will remember that the flight sim default was now defunct Meigs, which was just up the road from where I started grad school at the time. At some
point too a hot air ballon appeared over Chicago. Buzzing that was quite a thrill! I still have one of the early manuals and it has about a dozen
detailed airport maps in the back. these were the hot stuff. All other airports were just basically lines on the ground. here is one for old
timers: Does anyone recall the Flight Sim forum on compuserve? (I forget the name) it was a special interest group where at 300 baud you could post
questions and download files. hey, wait, that sounds familiar...

[AKLupine]

Yes! Back in the good old days when if you had a 1200 baud you had the fastest conection on the block and you had to wonder if you could ever fill
that 4mb hard drive On the Amiga the ground was lime green with dark green dots, and I recall that there was a brown field in the WWI section.

[ivo]

I started in January of 2004. It's only been a year.

[AeroJim]

i started w/ 2000 and the concorde, and than the 2002 professional edition, what was up with that anyways, y did they stop w/ the
proffesional stuff

[ivo]

maybe they didn't sell enough copies. Anyway I had the FS2002 pro.

[silo]

Errrm... The 1st Flight Simulator I purchased was in 1980 and was for the Sinclair ZX-81:

DBE,

Wow! Just text? You really need to be an extreme hardcore simmer to put up with something like that!
I guess this puts you ahead of everybody so far, or should I say...behind?

Seriously...only a line of text? And you paid for it or it was free?

[kvuo]

fs2 for c64. 1985 or 86..

[DBE]

silo wrote:

Errrm... The 1st Flight Simulator I purchased was in 1980 and was for the Sinclair ZX-81:

DBE,

Wow! Just text? You really need to be an extreme hardcore simmer to put up with something like that!
I guess this puts you ahead of everybody so far, or should I say...behind?

Seriously...only a line of text? And you paid for it or it was free?

Actually: it was a balloon Flight Sim... Check out the "B"!

The second screenshot depicts the 1st real flight simulator for the ZX-81 (complete with a whopping 16K RAM!!).

[silo]

Oh, now the "heat" item makes sense! So 1400 feet travel distance at 21 feet altitude? Did it take like what...a day?
Boy, am I happy about my Cessna...
Seriously though, that's a real piece of history you got.
The second one is much better. At least you have 3 monitors.

[poden]

Wow, there's some real "old timers" here! Compared to most here, I'm complete newbie, with FS2004 being my first flight sim, and only having owned it
since June '05. I had to wait until then because I didn't have a computer with the needed speed/power. However, I'm actually pretty familiar with
aviation; I develop avionics software, and have flown simulators to test flight software and computers. Buying FS (and FSP) was a perfectly natural
thing for me to do.