Mark & Michael,

It is kinda fun to look back at the things we thought as "modern" computers. The hard drive on this IBM-360 had four or five platters in a stack, each separated by about an inch or so. To change hard drives you would use a large plastic cover that looked like a really big cake cover. You would place the cover over the drive stack and screw the cover down onto the hard drive. Then you would pick up the whole hard drive and replace it with another drive which had another airlines data on it.

When I first got to TWA in early 1968 the flight simulators were primitive. The only thing that made them useful was that the cockpit was complete so that you were learning in what you would later fly. The visuals were very basic, just light points and some poor runway texture. The computers to run the simulator were massive. They had a main frame type core to store the aircraft data and ESRD's (electro servo resolver drivers) were used to communicate with the computer to show switch position and control input. Later, around 2002, the simulators were improved to the point where I think FSX is now. The full 6 axis motion of the modern simulator along with the full (every window) visual makes it a very real flight experience. I would love to try the D-Motion code seat to see how much it adds to FSX.

Lou