'PONG WITH PLANES'

摘要

FOR MANY PILOTS, THE WORDS MICROSOFT FLIGHT SIMULATOR take us back to the day we first fell in love with flight, however "fake" the flying may have been (or how young we were at the time). Clunky computers with cathode ray tubes and keyboard controls, nary a mouse in sight-much less a yoke or pedals-lit the spark for a generation of pilots who went on to become airline captains or AOPA editors. Decades later, what was clunky and cute is reborn as a sleek, stunningly realistic desktop simulator that has arrived just in time to help pilots emerging from pandemic-induced lockdowns sharpen their skills in perfect safety. First released in November 1982, Microsoft Flight Simulator version 1.0 was written for MS-DOS, and sold on floppy disks that today's teens might not recognize; there was no Facebook or Twitter on which to buzz about it back then. The realism of that first release leaned heavily on the player's imagination. AOPA Senior Director of Communications Eric Blinderman recalled that the 1980s iteration was "like playing Pong with planes." Over time Microsoft's game studio developed Bruce Artwick's original code into a more realistic, robust training tool.