My dad bought me Flight Simulator 4.0 before he got me a PC! It was torture for me but I read the manual (pretty good size manual) cover to cover many times until a few months later he was able to afford a Tandy 3000 NL computer which had a 286 processor. Of coarse, the first thing I did when I got the PC is play Flight Simulator. 
Never missed a release of Flight Simulator ever since!
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Solo Flight for Commodore 64. Somewhere around 1984-86
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I’ve been a casual simmer since FS4. I call myself a long time simmer but not very experienced or devoted.
As several of you, I’ve started with a Sinclair ZX81 and “Flight Simulation” more than 40 years ago.
You can play it online with your favorite browser: Play online: Flight Simulation
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My first flight simulator was with fsx. After looking to spend money on a different aviation game, my dad thought it was a better idea to do play the demo version of fsx. And he was right. I played it for weeks, if not months not having a clue what I was doing. Eventually bought fsx deluxe edition. Still not having a clue what I was doing, but slowly doing more realistic flights. All of this was on stock hp tower systems with no or a very weak graphics card so on ground it always was 5-10 fps, even used a pentium cpu for a few years on it. But I loved it.
Had a few year hiatus from simming then, wasn’t able to keep up with all the actions required during a flight, pc was slow, fsx was prone to crashing and needed serious tweaking in the .cfg files. Tried a few restarts with sims like dovetail games flight school and so on, which at the time was supposed to replace fsx. We all know how that went…
Then msfs came out, required specs didn’t seem to bad, had some other hobbies requiring a beefy machine as well so I bought a new PC. Started school for aircraft maintenance and now slowly working my way through the airbus a320 with the fenix. Still with the same joystick I got 10 years ago. It’s due to be replaced but the memories are always great knowing where I started
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The BBC commissioned a computer to be made to be used alongside a show they aired. My father got the ACORN and the Spitfire flight sim. I don’t remember the date, somewhere in the 80’s. Tricky to fly with no visuals and only a keyboard. But my father is a electrical engineer, so he made me a joystick, only a few centimeters high, but it was brilliant.
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My first ever encounter with a flight sim was Aviator on a 32kB BBC Micro back in 1983. I didn’t really get into flight simming again until FS95/98 timeframe though when computer graphics started to make progress (VGA/EGA) on a 8086 PC. Back then challenging the hardware & chasing FPS, 30 years later still doing the same. 
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On a Commodore Plus 4 (64kB) in the late 80s I had some aerial dogfight program with split screen, where each player had his share of the keyboard to steer the jet. After waiting for
the datasette drive to load.
Some years later, the Sublogic Flight Sim III on an Amiga 500 was the real thing. I remember drawing IFR maps of the flight areas (the FS disks were copied, so no handbook… )
And F-18 Interceptor: I still remember the epic intro sound, sweaty fingers on the joystick, and frustration when it crashed (not the plane but the program 
).
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Hewlett-Packard 486 machine and FS 5.1 in 1995
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Ah, so you’re the other Dragon 32 owner…I knew there’d be someone else out there somewhere! Good old Salamander Software. Tbh I’m still gutted I never finished Dragon Trek.
My first flightsim experience was with Psion Flight Simulator for the Spectrum. I was nine years old and didn’t have a clue how any of it worked. Didn’t really get the flight bug until Falcon on the Amiga. That completely blew mind.
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Great read! Love all of these stories!
My first experience was on an Apple IIGS. Does Thexder count as a flight sim…? 
I had Flight Simulator 2.0 and and RC sim that came with a sheet metal box with sticks controller. I can’t remember the name I haven’t been able to find any reference online.
I really got into the hobby with FS98, FS2002, IL2 & Combat Flight Simulator 3. I remember being in awe of the polished sheet metal effects in the graphics at the time.
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Apple II with Sublogic Flight Simulator from Bruce Artwick. Vector graphics, a 10 x 10 “world”, and optional air combat against enemy aircraft that were literally rendered as dots. I can remember dreaming that someday we would have the type of graphics that MSFS finally delivered.
Commodore 64 and Sublogic FS. Wasn’t there this Easter Egg in Hawaii? I only once made it through the volcano.
See also last post here: Easter Eggs request - Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020) - The AVSIM Community
For my first PC in 1990/1991 I bought “Sublogic ATP” (Air Transport Pilot) - great game with a pretty advanced carrier mode, flying in the US (and actually able to use the MS scenery addons). One large map with all airfields of the continental USA pinned to my wall.
And as second I had “Flight of the Intruder”, with the possiblity of one-to-one dogfights with a second PC via serial cable.
Afterwards I tried a lot of other games and simulations, but never missed a version of MS Flightsimulator. I loved the possiblilty to extend, configure and contribute to the simulation - the modern day equivalent to model-train sets - “build and extend your own little world…”
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I remember ZX81 very well! This computer could be switched into a “fast” mode where output to TV screen was disabled until task finished as no co-processor dedicated for displaying to TV screen existed yet. I actually devised a circuit board that allowed connecting two ZX81s together such that one accessed memory of the fast one while playing flight simulator so to become it’s dedicated video co-processor. It then flew very fast like a fighter jet! This ZX81 flight simulator had no relationship to the first MSFS since the ZX81 was a product from TIMEX.
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Awesome!
I got my ZX81 from Sinclair before Timex bought Sinclair.
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Ace of Aces on the Commadore 64.
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Seems I’m a latecomer when compared to some of your guys.
I started flightsimming on a Windows 98SE PC (can’t recall the specs) with the original MS CFS in 1999, closely followed by FS 2000.
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Got FS98 as a xmas present in late 1997. I do remember it didn’t run on the machine at home so I always had to go to a friend back then in order to fly. It was a crazy journey. We had a 75 MHz machine at home and the one we were using at his place, I believe that one was some 66 MHz machine with a little less than 1 GB of hard drive and I would assume 8 or 16 MB of RAM but I don’t know their exact specs.
Took some time until we found out how to make all the scenery actually show up.
Then we had an incredibly bad “joystick” that could move in four ways, back and forth, left and right, but had literally just “binary” on-off movements - so in either direction it would make a “click” sound and you’d have full deflection on the respective flight control. God was it awful. 
Then I got a book with a couple hundred pages that taught me how to fly - still have it on my shelf. Legendary. Til this day I certainly count that as my “flight school”.
Later on I had the chance to do some actual flights in Cessnas - naturally not a big problem thanks to MSFS. Experiences in full flight simulators followed and the invitation to become a beta tester for MS.
Time went by, and now I’m flying airliners around for a living… Crazy how things turn out 
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My memory might not be that accurate, but I recall playing Flight Simulator 5.1 on a Bull Intel 386 with 2Mo RAM, might be around 92/93/94. With my brother we had this book Flight Simulator 5.1 facile https://amzn.eu/d/hqt7xzZ giving us VORs and handflying calculating our position with rulers directly on the book. So much fun doing that…
EDIT: by the way my next simulator was… MSFS2020. Got super excited when I saw it being released on Xbox, I wanted to fly again recalling these memories. Looks like there was something as I kept playing and investing myself much more into this hobby
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Spectrum 48k
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