Took a day off from my FSGenesis production work for the first time in about nine weeks and decided to do something relaxing, like relaunching fs-fbo.com.  And we seem to have gotten off to a pretty good start.  Let's keep it up.  Invite all your friends, upload some pictures, some videos, write a blog, add some unique content.  That's what we're here for, to meet new friends, to share our common interest in flight-simming, and generally have some interesting fun, which is what a hobby is all about.

A now the day is almost done and I've been reflecting on where we've come from since the early days of the hobby.  I'm sure there are some real oldtimers that can remember back further than I, back to those days on Compuserve, and before that the dialup BBSs on 1400 baud modems.  I can still remember the ungodly noise of the modem's handshake.  Those days were before my time, but I've heard the stories.

I came into the hobby community back in late 1995 when I got my first internet connection.  Naturally my first Yahoo search (Google hadn't yet been invented) was for "flight simulation."  I was astounded at the number of hits.  I somehow stumbled upon the IUP Flightsim Mailing list and joined.  Back then the mailing list generated more than 300 messages a day.  It was there that I became interested in designing scenery.  There seemed to be a void for detailed scenery, although Alfred Grech had done a wonderful job of "covering the world" with runways.  This was in the days when FS had about 400 default airports, so Alfred really filled a niche back then. 

About the time I started designing, some new graphical design utilities were coming out and I quickly dove into them and started designing airports with buildings and uploading my work to ftp.iup.edu.  I received tremendous encouragement from the community, so I continued in my spare time cranking out packages.  Remember Delmarva, Northern New Jersey, West Virginia 98?  Then in the Spring of 98 thought I might be able to sell my work and did PANJ98, which became FSGenesis' first commercial product, winning the AVSIM Bravo Zulu award in 1999.  And the rest, as they say, is history.

But I was just thinking how much the hobby has changed and grown from those early Wild West days.  Back then there was no www.avsim.com, no www.simFlight.com and www.flightsim.com was just beginning.  Most communications among enthusiasts took place on Compuserve and various mailing lists.  And can't forget Al Pelletier's Comox Valley Flightsim Stopover site.  No one had broadband, there were few forums, FS5.1 came on a floppy disk and wouldn't even run until you entered the proper himem.sys setting in autoexec.bat.  People were excited when someone found a tweak to acheive double-digit frame rates on our Pentium 75 Mh with 256 kb of RAM and 800 Mb hard drives.

And remember those multi-colored blobs that passed for mountains?  And the runways that seemed to float off in the distance, then settled down to the ground as you approached them?  Man, how far we've come.

Anyway, I see these "kids" complaining about FSX and only being able to get 35 FPS.  LOL!  Oh, for a time machine to take them back to those days of hacking into the FS code and writing unauthorized compilers (BGLGEN, FSASM, SCASM), to the days when Microsoft lived in their ivory tower and never came down to mingle with the minions.  And remember Flight Shop?  Schiratti Commander?  Airport and Scenery Designer?  FSClouds? 

Yes, those were the days, my friend. 

Remember them?