Nostalgia & How It All Began...

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Lawndart
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Nostalgia & How It All Began...

Post by Lawndart » Thu Oct 13, 2011 4:52 pm

I was digging through my closet today and found the sim that started it all for me. The year was 1987 and me and my family spent the summer in Seabrook Beach, NH. I was nine years old... My dad brought a computer with (as usual), something that wasn't very common those days as portable computers were just that... a handle attached to your average sized desktop, but a lot heavier and certainly not travel sized. These machines were also pricey and very few people had PCs to begin with.

If you had 4-color CGA graphics as opposed to a display with nothing but green and black you were the coolest kid on the block. I still remember my dad coming back from Egghead (a software store of the era) with a copy of Falcon. That was how it all began for me. As the flyer in the box says "Head-to-Head (Two-Player) Dogfight Option!", was exactly what I did with my friends once I was back home in our basement connecting two PCs that would be considered ancient by today's standards via their serial ports. Mind you, LAN wasn't even available and this was still roughly a full decade before the internet even became mildly usable and probably about a dozen plus years before any kind of real online gaming started taking place, and then only via dial-up modem. Still, this game is as impressive to me now as it was back then. Whenever I look at the box art I get nostalgic! The simplicity, yet beauty and depth of this title is hard to match in my mind. For its time it was so far ahead of anything else...

A nice touch: CDs/DVDs? Try a 5 1/4 inch floppy and 3 1/2 inch disk! (See the system requirements - bottom left in the picture).
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A few other items I found:
  • My grandfather's rank insignia.
  • P-38 pin and AAF pilot wings.
  • AAF cloth map of China from WWII. Crews were issued maps of cloth rather than paper in case they had to bail out over the Pacific Ocean, they'd still have a useable map.
  • Rand McNally Air-age map of the world from 1943 with distances table on the back and a "new way of projecting the world".
  • Jeppesen E6B from 1961 with instruction manual. This one is high quality!
Treasures hidden away.
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Cobra
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Post by Cobra » Thu Oct 13, 2011 5:40 pm

Falcon was the REAL reason I convinced my wife we needed to buy a $2400 XT all those years ago. Fortunately I also acquired a version of TETRIS for it... which she still thinks is cool!

"Lock-On" to excitement. A vision of the future maybe?

I didn't know your Grand-dad was a P-38 pilot LD. The only P-38 I have ever seen IRL was a wrecked one in western Papua New Guinea. I will see if I can find the photo I took of it. it looked like a fairly standard crash landing on a flat piece of the country. I am fairly sure the pilot would have survived.

PNG has a lot of wrecks. I will also try to find the photo of a fairly pristine B-17 that sits near the top of a hill near Lae.

Off topic here but I flew with a ex-Iroquois pilot who swore blind he once saw 5 pristine Kitty Hawks sitting on an overgrown ex-wartime runway on the north coast of PNG. He was at low level at the time and slightly unsure of his position. He tried to find them again but couldn't. Imagine what they'd be worth today!?
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Cobra
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Post by Cobra » Thu Oct 13, 2011 5:47 pm

Not my Photos, but here is the B-17.

http://www.pacificwrecks.com/aircraft/b-17/41-9234.html
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Cobra
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Post by Cobra » Thu Oct 13, 2011 5:51 pm

Lol...and here is the P-38. Great website! I have walked around this wreck.

http://www.pacificwrecks.com/aircraft/p ... tcard.html
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Ray
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Post by Ray » Thu Oct 13, 2011 11:58 pm

That's an awesome find LD! I started in '95 with Janes USNF Gold on a PC that was much more powerful than your first. It was a HP 133 MHz.

I've got my Falcon 4.0 binder at home somewhere, got it on Dec. 12th '98, release day. I think I was running a HP 400 MHz PC.

I didn't know your grandad was a '38 pilot either, very cool. 8)
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Lawndart
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Post by Lawndart » Fri Oct 14, 2011 2:05 am

My grandfather was a reconnaissance officer on the P-38 over the Pacific during WWII and my grandmother's brother was a B-25 bomber pilot.

Neither are solely responsible for me wanting to become a pilot. I blame a fella named Bob Hamilton for that... a good friend of our family and father to one of my dad's best friends as he was younger. He flew the mighty F-4U Corsair in WWII and later went on to fly almost every single airplane that TWA ever owned, from the Super Connie to the 747 and L1011, before retiring. He truly lived the life during the Golden Age, a time when pilots were still looked upon as Gods and had flocks of flight attendants escorting them through the terminal (a la the new TV series "Pan Am"). As a young impressionable kid, having him talk my ear about flying is most likely the biggest reason I wanted become a pilot for as long as I can remember. His sons also went on to fly for a living with UPS and Continental Airlines.

My dad has worked most of his adult life as a network administrator and software developer aside from always having artistic hobbies and interests such as playing music and creating artwork, so that's how I was exposed to computers and tech toys from a very early age and during a time before most people had a plethora of gizmos in their homes (mid-80s). Those are the two main reasons how I got into aviation (and computers): 1) Having influential people around me, and; 2) Growing up as a young kid during PC flight simulation's infancy. The combination of those two main elements has undeniably played a huge role in how I learned to fly and why it's been one of the most natural things for me (even if I always had a knack for anything involving motor skills, such as sports).

Now, if only the airlines of today would value true piloting skill rather than simply considering pilots dime a dozen and all being equal...

Ray, you and I know well that there are a lot of mediocre pilots out there (some whom still exemplify the "perfect pilot" in the company's eyes, yet they can't fly/land a plane to save their life). Personally, I've always valued the art and skill of stick and rudder above anything else (even if the role of an airline pilot entails wearing many "hats" beyond simply being a good stick).

Anyway, that's the short version of how it began for me.
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Ells
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Post by Ells » Fri Oct 14, 2011 12:47 pm

Very cool LD.
Unfortunately the only nostalgia I have in my parents attic in Spain is my old Commodore VIC-20 with a green screen, my very first pre-PC when I was around 14 (1987).
My first exposure to flight sims was MSFS1 with an old yoke a work buddy gave me to try it with. I was hooked from that day.
I too grew up with the digital revolution and worked in a computer store making PCs with the 8086 processors with MS-DOS 3.1 and my first CD drive cost over $600 and the 8k modem I bought was about the same price.
Working it out I've been flying sims (as we know them) since I was 17 so that's 21 years ago (yes I really am that young!!).

It's always great hearing other pilot's (real or virtual) stories.
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Post by Beaker » Sun Oct 16, 2011 4:37 pm

Ah man... real AAF wings. How cool is that?
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