Last update of my new texture... link here --->http://www.megaupload.com/?d=9NCJWEAS

Thanks 707_Captain ! You can download it if you want, the link is on the first line of my post...

Download link not work for me, please upload another file service? (MediaFire etc.)

Merci beaucoup monsieur! 

Merci à vous CoolIP et Nick !
For 707-300 owners (without 707-300C) you must rename 'b707_c1_Spec.dds' file as 'B707_1_Spec.dss' in [texture.pelican] directory to avoid sun reflections on cargo door...

I worked for Air France dispatch in KJFK in the west wing of the IAB (international arrival building) in the mid 60's.

This was a dispatch pool of almost a dozen airlines. I worked an IBM-360 with a two foot hard drive and punch cards to load the wind data to produce one of the first computer generated flight plans. The IBM-360 was state-of-the-art in the mid 60's, today you would fall off your chair laughing if you could see it.

The weather maps would come in on a "wet" printer. This was a large format printer that used a rotating drum with an electric wire that would burn in the map data. We had to place the wet maps on a flat surface so they would dry with out tearing. Then we would place a large plastic overlay with the ocean coordinates so we could plot the forecast winds and enter that data on those stupid punch cards. If you dropped the stack of cards while transferring them from the punch machine to the confuser - you would have to start over! 

I remember running flight plans for CC (the 707C that is pictured above) many times. Several times a month one of "Le Pelican" flights would be called "Goldfinger" since it would ferry a lot of gold back to France.

Some of the other airlines were, Lufthansa, Alitalia, Aeronaves de México, Lan Chili, Loftleidir (now Iceland Air), Sabena (now gone!)

I had a great time working there and can tell you Air France was and still a great company.

Air France - les itinéraires plus large dans le monde.

Lou

LOU wrote on Jul 10^th, 2011 at 6:59pm:

I can imagine it to some degree.

The computer I worked with in the Army (1979-82) was a massive thing that filled up a room the size of a house. It used magnet tapes (like the ones on the old reel-to-reel tape recorders) to store the data. We had to change those tapes every time they got full, which didn't take very long at all. It was unstable and "fell over", this is what we called it when it crashed, at least once a week, sometimes more, leaving us to handle thousand of communications from the worlds military forces by hand until it got back up and running. I reckon my desktop computer would breeze through all that. It was an early sixties computer and it didn't have a hard disk drive (I never saw or heard about it). I used to hang around the Civilian technicians as much as I could and glean as much info from them as I could about computers. That's what led to me to the field of computers and IT.

Mark

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