Just a few random thoughts.

1. You know what memmaker is.

2. You remember getting excited the first time terrain was rendered with more than one shade of green.

3. Your flight sim equipment was programmed directly on the equipment, not in a windows program.

4. You thought something that came in a big box with 12 disks was something awesome.

5. You bought a computer with 320 meg HD and wondered how you could ever fill that thing up.

6. You got excited when you got a joystick with a HAT switch.

7. Making your first carrier trap involved flying your aircraft across a sea that was one shade of blue while looking for a gray speck on the horizon. That gray speck turned into a gray rectangle with a few irregular black lines across it.

8. After landing you swore that it was the most realistic experience you ever had.

9. 16 bit sound was amazing.

10. You got carpal tunnel typing in the command line to bring up your favorate game.

11. You were the first to get a Super VGA monitor.

12: The manual was in bound book form, and although you couldn't wait to read the 120+ pages, you went right to the Quick Start pullout. You saved the History/Background manual for later reading.

13: The game came with a background history, or color charts of the a/c.

14: You only had to worry about SP play, as there was no MP available. What was Multiplayer?
Therefore, the game had depth to it to keep you up late at night, wondering about your next promotion, the defense of your forward lines, etc.

Yep.

I'll add... calibrating my gameport joystick often, joysticks with trim wheels that needed adjusting too.

Ditto..

Remembering some others..

2:40 minute load time for Sublogic FS II

Man, you are not kidding. I've done and had all of those things!!!

You kids and your fancy 320MB hard drives, 16 bit sounds cards, and joysticks.

Everyone knows that real flight simulation occurred on a dual side floppy disks, beeping for sounds, and extensive use of the keyboard to fly. I know nothing of this hard drives and sound cards you speak of.

Jeez. You had it easy.

After placing a tape in the tape deck you had to find something to do for almost an hour while you waited for the game/sim to load. Atari 800XL


Number 3+4 FTW!! (Forgot all about Tomahawk, damn i loved that game)
http://zxgoldenyears.net/sim.html

5. You bought a computer with 320 meg HD and wondered how you could ever fill that thing up.

My first HD was 100mb and i was sure id never fill it up

Always trying to tweak for more available memory. "There's a memory leak in there somewhere, I know it!". Shut down all other apps. Compress disc. Start from a fresh boot. Yell "yippee!" when a proggie like Janes F-15 actually started after 15 minutes.

Rinse, spin, repeat.

1. You know what memmaker is. -- CHECK I remember having to use that for Falcon 3.

2. You remember getting excited the first time terrain was rendered with more than one shade of green. -- CHECK I remember being blown away by the multi-colored terrain in Falcon 3.

3. Your flight sim equipment was programmed directly on the equipment, not in a windows program. -- I'm a lefty so my flight sim gear consisted of a heavy ass Thrustmaster stick with the metal base and that's it.

4. You thought something that came in a big box with 12 disks was something awesome. -- CHECK I remember reinstalling Falcon 3 + Operation Fighting Tiger + MiG 29 a few times and that was over 10 disks.

5. You bought a computer with 320 meg HD and wondered how you could ever fill that thing up. -- CHECK I think my first PC (Packard Bell) had a 120 mb hard drive.

6. You got excited when you got a joystick with a HAT switch. -- CHECK

7. Making your first carrier trap involved flying your aircraft across a sea that was one shade of blue while looking for a gray speck on the horizon. That gray speck turned into a gray rectangle with a few irregular black lines across it. -- CHECK That sounds like the original Jet Fighter!

8. After landing you swore that it was the most realistic experience you ever had. -- CHECK

9. 16 bit sound was amazing. -- CHECK I remember how excited I was when I got the Sounblaster 16

10. You got carpal tunnel typing in the command line to bring up your favorate game. -- CHECK

And the inevitable progression of systems.

Me: I need a new xxx PC.

Wife: What for, the one we have works fine?

Me: It won't play JetBlaster from Outer Space!

Wife: You're an idiot.

Me: I want to play Jetblaster from Outer Space.

Wife: Fine. Idiot.

My Packard Bell had 4MB of RAM. I bought 2MB addon modules for $99 each to get 8MB.

The onboard graphics chip could only run 8bit color at 800x600, and I called Packard Bell to price the addon VRAM modules wanting to get 1MB of VRAM for 16 million colors. It was a couple hundred bucks or so, which killed that pretty quick.

I remember some of the Novalogic sims. I thought those were just incredible. The helo's and the tanks, the graphics were incredible. I tried to fire up one of those tank sims a couple years ago on a legacy machine. I couldn't even tell what the pixels were trying to do to each other.

Horrible, on today's standards.

I regret ever getting Packard Bells but they were the cheapest pc's you could get back in the early 90's and I was a poor college student so as a result, my first 3 PC's were all Packard Bells!

And you were thankful to have them!

We are a bunch of geeks. While other old guys sit around the porch and talk about the good ol' days of driving 57 Chevy's and eating C-Rats, here we all are discussing the early days of PC flight simming.

You young whipper-snappers! I was in HEAVEN playing F-15 Strike Eagle from Microprose on my Atari 800. I'd put the Top Gun soundtrack on and go blow up wireframe aircraft in the cloudless sky and blue triangles on the solid green ground. Life was good.

Falcon on my Atari ST was the next big breakthrough - it was amazing! I think X-Wing was the first "sim" I bought that I could install on my 20MB hard drive on my 286.

You were well behind the times man! When "X-Wing" came out, I already had a 486sx-20!!

My first hard drive was 20 Meg and I thought I would never be able to fill it.

Hence my username - Oldgrognard.

I remember dicing around in a few of the early "sims" on the C-64. I don't quite remember what my first sim was on the PC though; possibly FS3 which I remember doing on either a 286 or an older Amstrad 1640.

But yeah, check all of those, except 7 - I never was any good at the final part of being a naval aviator... and it's still true today XD

Ahhh, fun times, fun times.

Edit:
Incidentally, I think the highest amount of memory I managed to free up was about 612k; DOS 6.22 though, so there was all that DOS=HIGH,UMB stuff...