We've come a long way since 1953; thanks to everyone involved

Study level and stutter free. Butter-smooth fps! :wink:

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When I first started my Instrument Rating the ROTC detachment had a tabletop FRASCA with a pen-based plotter. You had to initiate the device and manually align the plotter on the paper.

It wasn’t quite as old and heavy as this Model 102, but the basic concept.

During this time period, Bruce Artwick had already released Flight Simulator 2 so doing the same thing inside a much smaller and easier-to-use Commodore or Apple II was mind-blowing.

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And thus, the Home Cockpit was born!

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Not if you watch the news today.

And here I was just 7 years ago teaching my IFR students on one of these things! It was used until just before Covid hit.

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Really! I thought that most of these Frascas had gone the way of the Dodo bird and flight schools had moved on to the BATDs and AATDs as opposed to these old electrical desktop devices.

That was an interesting flight through history!

Now with VR available the question is, what is more immersive: a VR headset but zero haptics and zero motion on the seat, or a fully rebuild cockpit sitting on hydraulic pistons that can fully move that cockpit - but with some ugly MS DOS 2D graphics in it`s “cockpit windows”?

But wait!
Soon we can have 3D screens with a sense of depth too :wink:

Brand new technology, AWESOME for cockpit builders!

It’s worth mentioning how awesome were the first computer graphics flight simulators by Evans & Sutherland. Back in early 70s this was worth over 20 million dollars!

and early 80s:

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That’s mind-blowing graphics for the early 80s. It wasn’t until the mid to late 90s that you started seeing that in home computers and games.

Semi-related, I remember a workstation that was purchased for me at my work in about 1998. It had an E&S video card in it. I remember playing Quake II on it. lol

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Reminds me of vanilla Xplane! Incredibly smooth though.

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