20 Years of Military Flight Simulations on the PC by Len "Viking 1" Hjalmarson.
Flight sim guru Len "Viking 1" Hjalmarson chronicles the first 30 years of computer flight sims, the software, hardware, people and the culture.
Table of Contents
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- 1971: Intel's first microprocessor
- An unknown company: Microsoft
- Steve Jobs is fired
- Air Warrior is born
The beginnings
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The Growth Years: 1990-1996
- A-10 Tank Killer
- Microsoft Flight Sim 4
- Chuck Yeager's Air Combat
- F-117A Stealth Fighter
- ThrustMaster
- Damon Slye at Dynamix
- TFX required 4MB of memory to run!
- Tornado
- ThrustMaster’s F-16 Throttle Quadrant System
- The cult of Su-27 Flanker
- Electronic Arts and Janes Combat Simulations
- 3DFX
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The Mature Years: 1997-2000
- Combatsim.com founded
- 3D graphics wars heat up
- Voice Control!
- SimHQ.com is founded
- European Air War
- DEBRIEF
- F-15 by Janes
- World War Fighters by Janes
- Total Air War
- Microsoft's first Combat flight sim
- The pace picks up...
- Falcon 4.0
- The Mature Years: 1997-2000
- USAF
- Enemy Engaged
- Su-27 Flanker 2.0
- 3DFX and Nvidia battle it out
- AMD, a new chip off the old block
- Nations
- F/A-18 by Janes
- Helicopters
- Microsoft Combat Flight Sim 2
- Jetfighter 4
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The New Millenium
- B-17 Flying Fortress 2
- Battle of Britain
- Eurofighter Typhoon
- Online gaming
- Fighter Ace III
- IL-2 Sturmovik
- Thrustmaster HOTAS Cougar
- GeForce 3 GPU
- LOMAC
- The future?
- A final word.
This article is ©2001 Leonard Hjalmarson and Thrustmaster ® and hosted with permission in the Flight Sim Museum. Unauthorised reproduction is forbidden.