Wow this brings back some really bad memories. My first PC was a TINY Computer, Pentium2, 266Mhz. Boy was it a heap of Cr*&p. It randomly switched itself on and off and in the end Tiny computers did admit it had a problem and repaired it. It was fun though. 
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How do you do that magic?
specs specs specs!
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Old PC never had a graphics card. I think it was part of the main board. and remember the monitor resolution was primitive…I think it was 640×480
Dont think - know 
Search for cga, ega, vga - learn and come back.
educational video: CGA Graphics - Not as bad as you thought! - YouTube
Even my 1984 C64 have an “graphics card” named VICII.
edit: I dont want to harm the beloved mda cards, sorry, of course they where then too in many many pc’s
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The standard CGA 320x200 did not have enough resolution for any flightsim. In the early days, color slowed everything down. VGA 640x480 was no option for the old flightsim before version 5 (and 486/2MB). When I ran 386+387 (high line at the time, 1MB of memory !), I especially asked for an “old” Hercules monochrome 720x350 because I liked FS-3. The frame rate as I remember it was around 8-10 for a 286/640 and my new PC did around 15 FpS on Hercules. It could run quite smooth (at 15) but most times it did not, especially while landing. Scenery was near zero (mountains)
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Wow… I sold soooooo many Hercules graphics cards.
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In 1988 it was already end of life cycle for Hercules graphics… I had to order monochrome separately. I loved that sharp, steady amber pixel… I did a lot of Turbo Pascal 3.0, directly writing into screen memory (B000:0000) and it was blazingly fast, compared to poking into CGA and VGA pixels at B800.
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I had a similar looking system, a Packard Bell with a Pentium I inside, it was a major upgrade over my first two PC’s (an i386 and then an i486). I used to love getting new PC Gamer magazine issues in the mail back in the 1990’s and was always excited to pop-in a demo disc.
I really enjoyed following the adventures and escapades of Coconut Monkey. Do you remember the interactive Coconut Monkey game for PC that came on one of the 1997 or 1998 holiday special demo discs? It was a short pre-rendered CGI background point-and-click adventure game full of jokes and weirdness. That was so much fun!
Ah… the good old days of reading PC Gamer, playing classics like DOOM, Quake, DN3D, several MSFS versions, Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Command & Conquer, Monkey Island 1-3, Full Throttle, Dark Forces, Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, Rebel Assault, Myst, Riven, Wing Commander I-IV and Prophecy, X-Wing, Tie Fighter, Comanche (on dozens of 3.5" floppy disks), Delta Force I & II, M1 Tank Platoon I & II, Crusader, Jane’s Harpoon and Fleet Command, Age of Empires I & II, Warcraft, Diablo, Heretic, Hexen, Tomb Raider, and many more classics were played.
Followed by relaxing to fresh episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 after long days gaming, hiking, or swimming at the beaches. Your photo brought back some serious nostalgia and a lot of fond memories. What a time it was to have been alive! 
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This is closer to the PC I learned to type on
WIth this the first PC game I played
It was in green and black though, never experienced it in those beautiful colors
Flight simulator 2.0 worked on it, crop dusting or something. I was hard to land with only a keyboard…
My first ‘flight sim’ was on the msx though, river raid!
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I really wish I would have kept some of those PC Gamer magazines.
Yep I had the 1997 and 1998 holiday demos.
I had the Ultima Online Edition.
Do you remember Wing Commander IV with the planetary missions?
OMG we were so freaked out by that technology!
Even had the original demo with Joint Strike Fighter by Eidos.
JSF was another sim before its time…talk about advanced graphics and flight systems.
The first sim I’ve experienced where you had so many different wingman commands including all formations. This sucker required 32MB of RAM and I only had 16MB.
I would still load up higher resolutions and crawl it…
Look how far we’ve come…■■■ is 32MB of RAM these days?
That was a big deal back then!
Till this day before Janes before DCS before JSF…this was the most complex and deepest military flight sim I’ve ever experienced. Way before its time. This very software and manual was fascination and very fuel behind me pursuing an adventure in the Air Force. I must have read the whole manual twice.
I found it in a flea market in 1997.
It had ■■■■ near every NATO coalition military aircraft and weapon system that ever existed from 1992.
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That’s the IBM PC-XT, what my students had… I was the instructor, so I had the IBM PC-AT (Big Dog).
Jim-Sim
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Man, now I wish I had all the gaming rigs I built over the years! Too late now. My first one was a clear case with blue LED lighting. They’re all in a municipal dump now. I guess ya just don’t thing of keeping stuff like that at the time. Sigh…
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Thanks, now I know what to google for! I remember the cpu speed was 0.81 mhz and it had two 10MB HDDs installed. Games simply ran slower on it, I got my time out of playing Xenon 2 on that thing. I thought I was quite good at it but had always been playing it in slow motion haha.
The good old PC adventure days, where you walk to the next screen, insert disk 7 or whatever and wait 45 seconds for the screen to load. Dreading having to go back 10 screens because you forgot something! And of course no internet, stuck for weeks in Police Quest hoping you find someone who knows how to continue.
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I started with a Sinclair Spectrum ZX20:
The Spectrum is based on a Zilog Z80, a CPU running at 3.5 MHz (or NEC D780C-1 clone). The original model has 16 KB (16×1024 bytes) of ROM and either 16 KB or 48 KB of RAM. Hardware design was by Richard Altwasser of Sinclair Research, and the outward appearance was designed by Sinclair’s industrial designer Rick Dickinson.[6]
Video output is through an RF modulator and was designed for use with contemporary television sets
A small tv (black&white), and a tape recorder for the software. Had to write down the tape counter numbers to know where a program would start and end.
Next one was the Philips P3120 8088 XT computer with Amber MDA/CGA/EGA monitor.
I added a 20MB HARDcard as a new HDD. It doubled the HDD capacity. That thing was as big as modern day graphics cards.
I remember having forgotten shut it down one night, and the Eagle logo of a program was burned into the monitor.
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First flightsims runs on much lower specs than cga, even monochrome at an sinclair spectrum.
See this thread: Okay, who else on here had this version of MSFS
But I agree, it was not always eyecandy
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