I discoved it back in the summer of 1995. It was microwings.com which was the most famous for that day.RH

Joined the compuserve forum in 1995 and still remember Ray Proudfoot and Pete Dowson's valuable contribution way back then.always remember finding Avsim back in 1998 when I worked in IT for a global bank. It was my lunchtime treat to read the pages of Avsim before getting back to another hard day's work.

I started probably in 89-90. I remember connecting through BBS's to get stuff. Then came compuserve, which I still kinda miss. Then Prodigy, AOL, etc.

I first began to notice the community in FS02, but only really got involved when FS9 came out. Then I really started to get involved. Now it's as much a part of me as actual flying.

I found this community about 3 or 4 years ago through a notice in one of the FS magazine.Then progressively I found out other sites and the amazing quantity of info, freewares, paywares, how-to-do-it etc...

I discovered Simviation about a month after I bought FS2004 - as soon as it came out! - and only in July last year did I discover sites other than Simviation. Unfortunately, the first site that I came across after Simviation was FSPlanet.com. What a great site, thought I! Look at all these downloads - they're good enough to pay for! Only about a month ago when posting a link to FSPlanet did I discover that, yes, they should have been paid for and, no, FSPlanet wasn't a good place to frequent! I went into deleting madness; nothing FSPlanet.com survived the dreaded + ! Now I never leave Avsim except - I admit it - to go to FlightSim.com! Only to compare reviews, promise! I tend to find that Avsim reviews are better written and contain more info, but sometimes they find something that they miss at Avsim over at the 'other site'...

i also got in to the whole community thing like, posting on flight sim forums, buying payware, etc. about 2 years ago aswell.

I joined flightsim.com in 1999 when FS2000 Pro came out but after a few years of not being online after moving to Sweden because dialup was charged by the minute here at the time and then we had to wait for ADSL to be wired to the house my account got lost some how. I jumped aboard here when FSX came out to find info on fixing the stuttering and framerate problems.

Hi,Wow, another 2006 ongoing forum topic. I started a BBS when I first started Flight Simming back in 1985. The BBS was called Trans-Continental BBS and was dedicated to Flight Simulation, I ran TriBBS software. I started when I was 24 years old, man I'm getting old.

1999. Just for a joke, I started to look around the internet for ways to enhance the experience for FS98. The movie Independence Day had just come out on DVD and there were tons of posts all over the web on the movie. Eventually one thing lead to another and someone took a picture of the same space ship used in the film. Something about one post on the web was a little odd. Looking a little more closely at the post, it turned out that it was the modeler's post for the machine itself in some forum.Following the link that was advertised in that post, I was brought to the classic Simviation site with a plethora of downloads!Needless to say, I've been a happy boy, and a "virtual" captain ever since!

2005 :D When I discovered FS2004 in my friend's house. Then I found FSX, not long later :( Cheers,Clem

When I began this hobby-obsession-addiction, two years ago it was not til 6 months later that I discovered there was an entire flightsim community out there on the WWW like this site full of forums, downloads, and commercial products. Curious, how long did it take you to discover you were not alone?

Clucth, didn't you make 9 dragons Kai Tak?Maybe not if you only discovered the community a year and a half ago? (if I understood correctly)Edit:Haha, just noticed the date you posted that :D

Edited January 16, 201214 yr by NZ255

My first experience with Flight sim was in about 1999 when my Dad got FS98. I was only 7-8 at the time so I knew absolutely nothing about what I was doing, but I enjoyed flying the C182 around the default Meigs Field! Then he got FS2000, and I did pretty much the same thing, though had worked out how to fly in different places eventually! It was about June 2006 I think when I finally got hooked. I went out to the mall one afternoon weighed down with recently received birthday money, and stumbled across FS2004. I bought that along with Just Flight's Airliner Pilot add on and it didn't take long after that before I was completely taken with it! At the time the only PC I had was our ageing family desktop which really struggled, but that Christmas I got a new laptop which enabled me to take me FS experiences further! I think it was around that time (early 2007) that I joined my first forum (not just first FS forum, but first forum entirely!), the Just Flight Forum. I found that in Flight Simming, the act of using Flight Sim is only half the enjoyment, as others above have said it wouldn't be the same without the communities on sites like this. As time went on a got more and more scenery and aircraft, and made FS9 my own. I think those were the happiest days of my Flight Simming career really. Since then it's become all about performance and troubleshooting, whereas before it was just all about flying! One aircraft got immense pleasure from flying was the freeware Project Fokker F28 - it had a really great tutorial with it that taught you how to fly airways using VOR and NDB navigation, which I learned a lot from and really enjoyed flying, and got satisfaction from successfully navigating the aircraft using 'the old method'! I wouldn't have discovered this aircraft hadn't it been for a screenshot post on the JF forum!Toward the end of 2007, I saw a good deal online and bought FSX. However it wasn't until the end of 2009, after the arrival of my i7 desktop rig, that I made FSX my main platform. It was around that time where I joined lots of other Flight Sim forums as well, including this one. I've now acquired lots and lots of add ons for FSX and still enjoy it immensely, but it's a different enjoyment now. It's all about trying to get the best graphics and the best performance, experimenting with settings and tweaks and testing them out. Now I find myself looking through people's screenshots and thinking "I want my FS to look like that" and then getting despondent because my PC can't handle it! Before in my FS9 days I didn't care what it looked like, it was all about the enjoyment and satisfaction of flying.There have been breaks for a couple of months here and there, but FS has played a big part in my life, and will continue to do so for many more years, whether it be with FSX, Xplane, or Flight. Even in the periods where I am not actively flying in FS, I've been present on the forums and usually that has persuaded me to start flying again! It's the community that makes this hobby, most definitely.

For me, it would be "rediscovered"At an early age, I was at tons of long-gone forums, but was too young to participate, and was mostly a wide-eyed lurker. After the flight Sim collapse, I drifted away to other genres, while playing flight Sims occasionally, when something interesting came along.Secret missions of the Luftwaffe was much too much for my machine back then, and I also skipped FS9, only returning for a fling with FSX that ended when I was unable to run it in the way I wanted too at any reasonable frame-rate.Fast forwards to My first discovery of the fledgling Orbx, the staunch Aerosoft, and the visually stunning Megascenery, and I went into lurk mode again while quickly buying up tons of scenery. (Actually I avoided buying Orbx for over a year because the forum attitude was a bit...... unusual, in my previous experience)I guess that leaves us at now. I am a middle of the road type of simmer, and my attitudes tend to be more of the general consumer variety, rather than the 200 page manual on my lap variety. As an avid console game player, I sometimes feel a bit out of place. I enjoy flying, though, and I hope if more casual and consumer-level flyers arrive with that new-fangled FLIGHT! thingy, there is a warm spot, waiting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqOT-wEUDL8&feature=player_embedded

Edited February 28, 201214 yr by HiFlyer'

Found this forum just a couple weeks ago. Just happened to notice the AVSIM tab when on HI-Fi's site, been a long time supporter of their products. Finding this forum sooner sure would have helped with the learning curve I experienced with FSX.