Ancient Software

[Slim]

Back in 1992, my old pal Shaun Appleby and I, the Unix section leaders at Rolls-Royce and Associates at the time, were loaned a copy of a program called Aviator by Sun Microsystems, our hardware vendor. I've been going through old documents, and it turns out that I still have it.

This was a simple multi-user flight combat simulator that you could run on networked machines, so users could dogfight each other from different workstations. It had been commissioned by Sun as demonstration software for their very expensive workstations with GX graphics acceleration.

https://techmonitor.ai/technology/aviator_15_for_sun_networks_opens_up_graphics_workstation_games_market

Shaun and I got it working on a SPARCstation 2GX, a system that probably had 16 or 32MB of RAM. It would normally have cost about £25,000 I think (although the Ministry of Defence paid for it and probably got it cheaper) and the company didn't have many of those. We didn't get it working in multi-user mode because we only installed it on one machine but we had a blast flying around in an F18 one afternoon.



I would say that the graphics capability was somewhere between a PS1 and a PS2, but that was pretty impressive for 1991 when the software was released. The networking aspect was ahead of its time, and it used real satellite data for the terrain you flew over - the Hawaiian islands and San Francisco bay. You could already get crude flight sims for PCs but this was next level.

Despite that - the aircraft controls were extremely simple and there were no "missions". All you could do was fly around, and if someone else was logged in, you could shoot at them. But the intention was only to demonstrate the graphics performance of the hardware. It wouldn't have been a viable product in its own right. Clearly very few people would spend money on a game to run on a workstation costing five figures.

Someone has uploaded a few seconds of the game working here:

https://www.reddit.com/user/rmini/comments/yzlmxe/aviator_151_on_sunos_414_12/

[R6GYY]

Going back about 5 years before that - does anybody remember the ambitious BBC (others were involved of course) endeavour called The Domesday Project?

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

I remember seeing an example of the kit and having a play with it when I worked at HTV in Cardiff (so sometime between 1988 and 1989 I think).

[Slim]

Going back about 5 years before that - does anybody remember the ambitious BBC (others were involved of course) endeavour called The Domesday Project?

Yes! The library at Teesside had a copy when I was doing my degree there. I was very excited to have a go. I did a search for "Hartlepool" and uncovered a couple of local history nuggets.

I also recall that there was an online version a few years ago, but that seems to have disappeared now.