While enjoying the festivities of 40 Years of Flight Simulator, it unfortunately slipped Microsoft's mind, that the founder or inventor or what ever you want to call him, was Bruce Artwick. Mr., Artwick and his company BAO (Bruce Artwick Organisation) had their domicile in Champaign, IL, from where they developed several versions of Flight Simulator. A couple of years after the first version BAO was split up in BAO and Sublogic. In the early 90's Flight Simulator was fully acquired by Microsoft. 

So thanks to Bruce Artwick we have been enjoying Flight Simulator over years and/or decades.

I thought it was well  in place to mention the founder of FS on this day.

20 minutes ago, hvw said:

While enjoying the festivities of 40 Years of Flight Simulator, it unfortunately slipped Microsoft's mind, that the founder or inventor or what ever you want to call him, was Bruce Artwick. Mr., Artwick and his company BAO (Bruce Artwick Organisation) had their domicile in Champaign, IL, from where they developed several versions of Flight Simulator. A couple of years after the first version BAO was split up in BAO and Sublogic. In the early 90's Flight Simulator was fully acquired by Microsoft. 

So thanks to Bruce Artwick we have been enjoying Flight Simulator over years and/or decades.

I thought it was well  in place to mention the founder of FS on this day.

Please do not leave out Stu Moment who was a major player in subLogic from it's early days on, helping bring us and Bruce Artwick from FS1 forward through a major lawsuit with Microsoft to Flight Assignment:ATP in the early to mid-90's.  ATP brought flight simulation to a level well beyond FS at the time. 

From Wikipedia:

"Bruce Artwick left Sublogic in 1988 to form BAO Ltd. (Bruce Artwick Organization), retaining the copyright to Flight Simulator, which they continued to develop. BAO and the copyright to Flight Simulator were acquired by Microsoft in December 1995.

After Artwick's departure, Sublogic continued under the ownership of Stu Moment, who produced Flight Assignment: A.T.P. in 1990. It specializes in simulating passenger airliners, using a scoring method to determine the performance of the user. Sublogic began a new flight simulator, but in late 1995 was acquired by Sierra,^[8] which completed the program and released it as Pro Pilot in 1997.

Moment continues to run the present Sublogic Corporation as a generic simulation company, in addition to being an airshow display pilot with his Classic Airshow company."

Edited November 11, 20223 yr by fppilot

7 minutes ago, fppilot said:

Please do not leave out Stu Moment.

Stu Moment was the president of Sublogic and cooperated with Bruce Artwick

Edited November 11, 20223 yr by hvw

6 minutes ago, fppilot said:

Stu Moment.

was not the developer of FS1 nor FS2

18 minutes ago, turbomax said:

was not the developer of FS1 nor FS2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublogic

He’s also a super smart nice guy.

The code wasn’t as complicated, but the challenges he needed to overcome to produce something functional with so few resources were arguably just as difficult as  getting CFD to work on a modern CPU.

2 hours ago, fppilot said:

3 hours ago, turbomax said:

Stu Moment was not the developer of FS1 nor FS2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublogic

Bruce Arthur Artwick (born January 1, 1953)^[1] is an American software engineer. He is the creator of the first consumer flight simulator software. He founded Sublogic after graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1977, and released the first version of Flight Simulator for the Apple II in 1979. His original Apple II software was purchased by Microsoft in 1982 and became Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0.^[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Artwick

Edited November 11, 20223 yr by turbomax

55 minutes ago, turbomax said:

Bruce Arthur Artwick (born January 1, 1953)^[1] is an American software engineer. He is the creator of the first consumer flight simulator software. He founded Sublogic after graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1977, and released the first version of Flight Simulator for the Apple II in 1979. His original Apple II software was purchased by Microsoft in 1982 and became Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0.^[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Artwick

Gee Turbomax?  Seems very unusual.  Something deeply personal at play here with Moment?  Most successful developments have both a technical side and a business or strategy side.  Both are important to get a product to market, and especially in front of companies like Microsoft, which by the way was not that large in 1991 when they were approached.  

Edited November 11, 20223 yr by fppilot

1 hour ago, fppilot said:

Gee Turbomax?  Seems very unusual.  Something deeply personal at play here with Moment? 

in 1990, subLOGIC tried to publish ATP. However, Microsoft, with BAO's backing, promptly sued ATP for using "copyrighted code" which was created for Microsoft FS3 by subLOGIC back then. With the court date set in the far future (1991) and money running out, subLOGIC settled out of court. They were forced to relinquish all referneces to "flight simulator". With those concessions, ATP was published in Winter of 1990.

https://www.mobygames.com/company/sublogic/overview/list,1/

46 minutes ago, turbomax said:

in 1990, subLOGIC tried to publish ATP. However, Microsoft, with BAO's backing, promptly sued ATP for using "copyrighted code" which was created for Microsoft FS3 by subLOGIC back then. With the court date set in the far future (1991) and money running out, subLOGIC settled out of court. They were forced to relinquish all referneces to "flight simulator". With those concessions, ATP was published in Winter of 1990.

https://www.mobygames.com/company/sublogic/overview/list,1/

Fully agree with that summary.  I was a member of a a three member group that met with subLogic at CMI shorly after the settlement to learn more about the launch of ATP. We had been closely following the legal wrangling since 1989. We had heard that ATP would include all USA airports as well as published IAPs. We relished the release of ATP.  I believe we met both Artwick and Moment on that day.  The release of ATP came some months after the legal settlement.  We subsequently formed the first Virtual Airline, Sunair, Airline of Imagination, on the Prodigy service and later on Compuserve. It used ATP as its foundation.  Both Artwick and Moment were key figures in the transition from early FS to ATP.

Edited November 12, 20223 yr by fppilot

2 minutes ago, fppilot said:

Both Artwick and Moment were key figures in the transition from early FS to ATP.

except that Bruce Artwick developed Flight simulator, Stu Moment did not. He ran the business side and was a good pilot and Elvis impersonator, while Bruce did not have a pilot license at the time. Just saying because "Bruce Artwick" is the thread title.

Whatever floats your boat.......

1 hour ago, turbomax said:

in 1990, subLOGIC tried to publish ATP. However, Microsoft, with BAO's backing, promptly sued ATP for using "copyrighted code" which was created for Microsoft FS3 by subLOGIC back then. With the court date set in the far future (1991) and money running out, subLOGIC settled out of court. They were forced to relinquish all referneces to "flight simulator". With those concessions, ATP was published in Winter of 1990.

https://www.mobygames.com/company/sublogic/overview/list,1/

We learn something new everyday, thanks!🍻

His thesis:

https://archive.org/details/AVersatileComputerGeneratedDynamicFlightDisplay/mode/2up

 

2 hours ago, turbomax said:

in 1990, subLOGIC tried to publish ATP. However, Microsoft, with BAO's backing, promptly sued ATP for using "copyrighted code" which was created for Microsoft FS3 by subLOGIC back then. With the court date set in the far future (1991) and money running out, subLOGIC settled out of court. They were forced to relinquish all referneces to "flight simulator". With those concessions, ATP was published in Winter of 1990.

https://www.mobygames.com/company/sublogic/overview/list,1/

I am now confused.  Sublogic settled out of court and were forced to relinquish all references to flight simulator?  Ok.  Who then after all that was the publisher of ATP?  I understood it was Sublogic.  Was it instead BAO?  I honestly do not recall. 

So did we as a community get two wins?  FS with MS and ATP with whoever?  Acually not sure about the lineage of FS after all of that.  Did  BOA continue to develop for MS? Or did MS take charge then?  No idea.  I did some digging tonight and found no leads and no answers.  Would be interesting to find an independant report of all of that.  Certainly a tumultous time for flight simulation.  We seem to have emerged pretty well.

In regard to a 40th, it was clearly both that brought FS to life for its PC lineage.  There were similar relationships at Microsoft with its development and growth, and with Intel, and many other tech startups.

Edited November 12, 20223 yr by fppilot