Simming for almost 30 years . MSFS , Red Baron , Aces over the Pacific , Strike Commander and Fleet Defense were some of the early ones i flew . BoB , Falcon 3&4 and BMS later .
Now I fly exclusively in DCS VR and i am no less excited (and thrilled) than when i was a kid .
CV1 for the past two years , just ordered a RiftS today , although that’s gonna be asking a lot of my 1070 
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I first paired my rift with an old i7 920 with 12Gb Ram and my sons borrowed 980GTX I also had to buy a PCI USB 3 card.
I since upgraded my PC hardware to an 8600k 1080GTX and 32GB ram.
I was relatively late to PC use, 2000 was my first desktop PC but I was flying on the megadrive and PS1 with all sorts of mad titles including the first version of Acecombat
I cant fly in 2d anymore since the rift arrived and enjoy X plane Il2BOS with all the additional releases and my favourite SIM of all time DCS
Welcome 
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I think that is the most profound and eloquent sentence to ever grace the electrons of Mudspike. 
Mine too…albeit my big cardboard box was an Apollo command module going to the moon. 
I think that’s a big part of it.
True enough, however one has to exercise much less fantasy fill rate…and I think that is my point.
I’m not a Neurologist but have had more than my fair share of being treated by one. (I had a hemorrhagic stroke in March 2012 that took out my whole left side, speech, etc. Much better now.) Through it all I learned that the brain is an amazing thing. I wonder if the fact that we had to exercise our imaginations more with those early sims, is another reason why we have such fond and memorable memories of our times with them…hmmmm…
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Sounds entirely plausible to me.
And, as home computers were pretty new back then, I think we valued them more than how kids today value their consoles. Novelty wears off…
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Agree regards “cutting edge”.
I remember how very impressed I was the first time I saw a 3d accelerated title, strangely enough it wasn’t 3dfx or even on a Voodoo card for that matter. It was on of all things a basic Permedia 2 from Compusa and the title was Wing Commander Prophecy. It had D3D support in it by that time and I fell in love.
My now ex Bro-In Law had dumped a Dell Optiplex with a P 166 in it and I learned how to Internet on that thing.
So instead of joining the questionable “chats” available on AOL at the time I hijacked the browser back ( read, installed Netscape) and started to hang out places with the unlikely names of “Biohaz” and “SimHQ”.
“Blackhole Motorsports” was another early hangout- back in those days you could still catch the occasional pick up race with Little E before him and Truax had that whole “do it like in the sim” moment caught on radio, that pretty well put Nascar 2003’s price into the Stratosphere until iRacing came along.
But I agree totally about the Technology curve and imagination- it was kind of the point in my posting. I remember being blown away by games like “Jet Fighter” for DOS back in the day because although EVERYTHING was green- YOU were in actual 3d so your mind tended to fill in the blanks as you landed (or attempted to).
In the spirit of Chris’ “read it- fly it” pieces I’ve flown the Beech Staggerwing under the Golden Gate bridge in FSX and Prepar3d as one of the characters in a W.E.B. Griffiths novel series does this and there are MANY mods to make FSX or I assume P3D as well do “historical” type flights where even the scenery can be modified to be period correct.
Just simply amazing technology and the ability to just pick up a phone or computer and order it is wonderful.
Another line of thinking (given the nature of my work) is possible applications for use in health care and NOT in necessarily the way the companies have been pursuing. No, I’m thinking more like what Nintendo was on to with the Move, letting the Resident/Patient use VR as not only adaptive but possibly augmented as well. I used to get furious at the disparity between my TrackIR system and similar systems being utilized at Taxpayer expense for people to interface with their fancy laptop PCs for portability. Two hundred bucks versus three thousand is a bit of coin, Ladies and Gentlemen, and when it’s being paid for from the Public dollar I tend to look towards frugality if possible.
But back towards my “reasoning” if we can call it that.
My time with my Father, the Late Airline Transport Pilot was all too brief. As I was just coming into the “digital realm” shall we say right about the time that he passed away there was no chance for us to hangar fly and participate in Simulators as might have been reasonably expected if only a few more years had elapsed. Since his computer at the time of his death was more powerful than mine I feel that is a reasonable assumption although he had NOT discovered Simulation software as of that point. He did allow as that he was once employed by Boeing as a Programmer in the '60s when I was a tiny person. THIS from the guy who used the “pull the cord from the wall” method to shut down Windows 98 which was the then-current OS which sent the then-current me into fits. As I type this now I have a new-found respect for his methods. Cortana has paid a heavy price- I hear MS is back-seating and/or deleting her - the whole Windows 10 rollout comes to my mind now and frequently I have resorted to his tried and true methods to “correct” Windows as well. Ruthless machine thinks it needs another daily “patch” for features no one was using- until one day there you are actually using them.
But again my thoughts are driven by such intriguing things as people’s “digital” footprint if you will. Especially given the recent loss of my Wife who wasn’t a camera person due to her self-perception issues- thereby effectively leaving me with less that a dozen or so pictures from a marriage of almost thirty years’ time. Contrast that with such things as the ghost replay files of Big E playing Nascar Heat or even the recently released content for GT Sport by the “Maestro of GT” himself, Mr. Lewis Hamilton. Which is being lauded as having “VR content” by SIE themselves.
We are headed to a bold new future and since we helped make it I’m trying to figure out how to preserve the “nice” part- the part our grand-kids might actually WANT us to keep for them.
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