Holy smokes does this "Computer Chronicles" episode take me back!

I was an enormous flight sim kid, playing many of the earliest editions of "Microsoft Flight Simulator", along with pretty much all of the Dynamix titles, from "Red Baron" to "A-10: Tank Killer", to the later "Aces of the Pacific" and "Aces Over Europe" releases.

Interestingly, my 3DO sampler disc has a preview of the apparently then-planned port of "Red Baron"-- can you imagine how cool that would have been, rendered using the 3DO's "Cel Engine"? That port never having gotten completed is one of my biggest 3DO regrets, I'd still be playing that today had it come out.

Seeing a young Damon Slye was a real treat, he was one of my game design heroes as a kid. I had a friend who was a die hard MicroProse fan. I was never big on their games, but watching Bill Stealey-- a real Air Force pilot-- was pretty cool.

It's difficult to explain to people today just how ambitious video and computer games were back then. A 386 33 was only capable of 11.4 MIPS, yet programmers were making full-fledged flight simulators with hundreds of fully-recreated cities and airports, evolution simulators (Sim Earth), city simulators (Sim City), and so forth.

Today's CPUs are so powerful that they seemingly don't even publish or advertise MIPS numbers for them! And we get infinite re-releases of dudebro shooters, re-releases of annual sports franchies, and racing games little more advanced than "Gran Turismo" from 1998, running on the original PlayStation. Thank goodness Nvidia took a gamble on ray tracing, because it's about the only thing I can name since 2002 (shader model 1) that's actually some form of risk taking, versus the intense "quarterly numbers" conservatism which dominates tech (the entire world really) today.

One last note: the increasing prevalence of CD-ROM mentions in these episodes reminds me of the first single-speed drive my dad bought in the very early 90s. It had this cartridge kind of thing with a flip-top that you would eject-- you'd open it, put the disc in, close it, then insert that whole metal and plastic piece back into the drive. We had "Microsoft Bookshelf", which got a shout-out in this episode. We soon upgraded do a double-speed drive, and even by that time the modern-day tray mechanism was in use.