![]() Unlike other manufacturers, Compaq reverse-engineered IBM’s BIOS and wrote a clean-room design to be compatible with it.Ĭustomers obviously had a vested interest in ensuring the IBM software they’d previously purchased would run on a so-called “IBM Compatible,” and the industry developed two unofficial tests for verifying backward compatibility: Lotus 1-2-3 and Flight Simulator. There were a number of applications that didn’t run properly on some of the early IBM clones, due to what Atwick described as a “bug in one of Intel’s chips.” Of the early clone manufacturers, Compaq was virtually the only one who could deliver true compatibility. This version of the program became known as Flight Simulator 1.0, and became part of the standard test suite for evaluating whether PCs were truly “IBM Compatible.”Īs some of our older readers may recall, in the early days of the clone PC market the degree of compatibility with software written specifically for IBM’s PC products could be… dicey. Originally created by Bruce Atwick in 1977, it was licensed by Microsoft for the IBM PC with CGA graphics in 1982. The last flight simulator I seriously played was Falcon 3.0 in 1991, so I can’t exactly call myself a giant fan of the genre, but the cockpits and visuals of Flight Simulator are almost enough to make me reconsider.įlight Simulator is actually the oldest franchise Microsoft owns, predating even Microsoft Windows.
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