Dam Busters on Colecovision Adam, played off the tape drive 
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Spectrum Holobyte’s Falcon on an IBM XT my father had upgraded to 640x of ram and a graphics adapter I’ll never forget called the Zuckerboard. I was a big Specrum Holobyte junkie back then owning Falcon and PT109.
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On our '286 clone PC way back when I also played a lot of Chuck Yeager’s Advanced Flight Trainer.
Graphics were really bare-bones but it had more of a focus on aerodynamics and learning to do landings in a tricky plane, or complex high-speed maneuvers, rather than being a wrapper for a pew-pew combat game, and that had some unique appeal.
Also, when you crashed the face of famed test pilot Chuck Yeager appeared to rib you for it
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Microsoft Flight simulator 5.1 on a Pentium 1 133mhz
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My earliest PC experience was round at Baracus house as he was the only kid at school with a BBC Basic so he was instantly the “cool kid”.
It was either in the 80s or it might have been 2018 I can’t remember which, he was either way ahead of technology or had priceless vintage stuff.
I introduced him to his love of flight through this text based flying game with no graphics where you just typed “bank left”, “bank right”, “land” etc. For some reason it didn’t recognise his inputs of “dive”, “barrel roll”or “stol”. Tape drives hadn’t even been invented, we were running this thing off vinyls late in to the night.
While I quickly moved on to more modern stuff, the slow pace of the game and 4hz refresh rate is why even to this day he won’t consider any plane quicker than 85mph.
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FS 2.0 on an Intel 8088 xt with Hercules monochrome graphics card, on a green (ugh) monochrome monitor. My eyes are still burning a bit from that screen 35 years later, but it was epic at the time to my 12 year old brain. 
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hahahhaha - that’s epic mate!!! 
If only I would be happy with 4fps these days… could have saved myself a LOT of fiddling time with this &%*! software!
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Atari 130XE playing F-15 Strike Eagle.
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Commadore 64 and Flight Simulator! Loved it! Had no idea what I was doing back then.
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First flightsim I flew with ATC!!!
Felt so satisfying to complete a flight without ATC making fun of you…
“Ignited (United) 337 cleared for takeoff, “ chatter often heard near SFO!
Scratch-built 486-50 back in 1995. Computer geek buddy made sure I had the right parts, we went to the Pamona Computer Fair and a variety of stores, like Fry’s. He wasn’t a gamer, so the system was more suited to my teaching work. It would be years before I got the idea of what would make a good performing system (and how much (eek) that would cost. Stuck with it and here I am, retired, with a system that’s been able to handle all MS has thrown at me the last three years. Cheers, Chums!
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When I was a kid in the 1980s, my family had a Commodore VIC-20 and C64 with a variety of really primitive flight simulators. I was super young at the time and didn’t really know what I was doing in any of them.
The first memories I have of actually using a flight sim and feeling like it was a somewhat rough approximation of real flight came when I was a teenager in the 90s. By then, my family had swapped our C64 for an Intel 486-based Compaq Presario desktop running MS-DOS 6.0 and Windows 3.1. I had several popular flight sims from the era (both civilian and military) including:
- Microsoft Flight Simulator 5.0
- Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat
- Falcon 3.0
- Red Baron
- Aces Over Europe
- Aces of the Pacific
- Flight Unlimited
- Sierra Pro Pilot
- Fly!
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ohhh red baron and sierra pro pilot! forgot about those!!
I’m happy someone finally mentioned the TRS-80 Color Computer. This was my first computer back in 1984. I eventually wrote a few popular programs for the machine.
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Started in '86 at age 12 with Flight Simulator on a Mac 512kE, greyscale but real smooth. I used to make my own approach plates in MacPaint, and though I didn’t have the manual for it, I once ventured out into the unrendered unknown void of nothing using dead reckoning to see if Seattle was there, lo and behold it was, it appeared floating in the island of emptiness so I was able to land and end the flight NExt up was Chuck Yeagers AFT on the same computer, and this was awesome as well for different reasons - the ability to record your flight and then play it back as an AI meant I spent way too many hours flying close wingman to my pre-recorded self flying super low level and super high speeds… again in greyscale but it was a very fast computer for its time and the framerates were super smooth!!! I didn’t get my first PC until 1994, and it wasn’t until about 1996 that they achieved the same smoothness as my 1986 Mac, though the software had started its long journey to be ‘as real as it gets’! Now with VR it’s another level entirely and MSFS is so much better than FSX and a long long way from 1986… now it’s almost better than being there
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I think the nearest I had was Gunship 2000 on a Spectrum +3. It was on cassette (even though the +3 has a 3” disk drive). The joy i got from flying a green triangle. 
A few years later I used to play an A320 sim on my friends Atari ST (I think it was the Atari, might have been the Commodore)
Years later (now about 20) I had a PC, an AMD 133MHz, but with the 3DFX card and EF2000 with the Graphics + patch. It ran in DOS4GW with the GLIDE drivers and was superb.
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FS3 1991 and all the following versions since…
My brother is not into simulators but collects vintage software and these are part of the collection. 
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Can’t remember the exact year but i bought a 386 pc, with dos i think, specifically for Microsoft flightsimulator 3 (FS3).
Wanted to be a pilot from age 4 so buying this was a no brainer to me. Learning everything i could of a world that had always fascinated me.
To this day it was my best experience ever in any flightsimulator. Because this was a whole new world for me, a world i always wanted to learn about, learning to steer an aircraft, finding out what flaps are (i had no idea aircraft even had something called flaps), everything was so truly fascinating and immersing, i really soaked it up, often till the morning hours, i missed a lot of sleep in those years but couldn’t stop flying.
So i can truly say that none of my later experiences with flightsimulators (and i’ve had them all) ever even equalled this magical thrill of the first few years with FS3.
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Sublogic Flight Simulator on TRS-80 model 1. Then after an hiatus of around 10 years, FS5 on a 486 and haven’t stopped since. Used every iteration from FS5 and most other products also.
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