170 S1/General/Help
13-May-91 15:15:39
Sb: WELCOME (a short history)
Fm: Rick Lee / Associate SysOp
To: ALL
** WELCOME **
Welcome one and all to the new Flight Simulation Forum. For quite
some
time now the 3 Flight Simulation sections of the GAMERS Forum have
been
generating more messages than many whole forums on CompuServe...
so
we are very happy now to welcome you to this new forum devoted solely
to
computer simulated aviation!
How did this happen? Beats me! Allow me to reminisce.
Back in 1988 I got my first modem... a 1200 baud modem for my Atari
ST. It
shouldn't surprise any of my friends here to learn that I got it mainly
so
that my friend Mike Keller and I could stop carrying our computers over
to
each other's houses to do FS multi-player flying. So... now that I had a
modem I naturally started poking around various BBS systems and online
services
trying to scare up some good conversation regarding Flight Simulator. I
could find a message here and there... but the chat could never
sustain itself beyond a few messages and a week or so of time. Was I the
*only* certified FS nut in the entire country? Where were my comrades?
I kept reading about the amazing sales of various versions of Flight
Simulator... where were these people anyway?
I tried and tried to stir up discussion wherever I could... but
nothing
really stuck... until.... SubLOGIC's Holly Hardyman set up shop in
the (then called) GAME VENDORS Forum here on CompuServe. At first it was
just me and a few other die-hards who found each other. We stayed... the
SubLOGIC Section became a strong magnet for FS nuts. Eventually the
flight
sim discussion got up to an amazing 5 or 10 messages per day! I was
really
getting excited now.
Looking back at some of the early transcripts I see a surprising
number of
familiar names... like Greg Cronau, John LePire, Robbie Fields, Scott
Miller, Matt Elwood, Dave Bartholemew... people who remain active still.
Pretty soon the group started discussing all sorts of flight sims...
while SubLOGIC played the very tolerant host to our discussions of
everyone else's products. "Nightshift" the main sysop of the
Games forums
took notice and created a new home for this band.. the first Flight
Simulators
Section in GAMERS where she appointed me as the first Section
Leader.
Eventually the handful grew to a few hundred and the message rate
grew
from 10 to 200 messages per day and here we are! A whole Forum!
Whew!
Thanks to the CompuServe staff, the great software publishing reps
and
especially the members who have created this phenomenon... onward and
upward!
>>> Rick Lee <<< Associate SysOp
Rick
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