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Comment by TerminalJunkie | Hacker News Reader

It's very impressive to me that Microsoft took the technical details of Flight Simulator so seriously that it fielded questions from customers like this. What's doubly more impressive is that Bill Gates got directly involved with what is essentially a bug report.

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I don't know how true this is, but FlightSim was kept alive way longer than economically feasible because Bill Gates personally kept it alive.

It's one of the oldest Microsoft products that's not Office or OS-based. Truly amazing how much time they've invested in it over the decades. I wonder how much code from the 1980s is still shipping.

> It's one of the oldest Microsoft products that's not Office or OS-based.

It's older than any of the Office components, too.

Yeah, looks like the core code dates from 1977 (!) and Microsoft acquired it in 1981. That's a heck of a legacy.

Definitely is quite a legacy. I didn't realize it went back that far, but I do recall it running on DOS. Only had one brief go at it on a friend's computer in the late 80s. Don't recall being very good at it. As I recall, it wasn't very friendly to mistakes, especially on landing. I remember crashing a lot.

I had a version for C-64 in high school. Taking off and landing was about all you could do, given the graphics.

Yeah, I played Atari ST version and it was a blast. Gorgeous filled polygons, up to 4 simultaneous 3D views, weather conditions, stunt flying... However this is off-topic as only PC versions were made by Microsoft.

It even lives inside Office as an easter egg:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gYb5GUs0dM

Not anymore. Around the turn of the century Microsoft adopted a strict no Easter eggs policy as part of their trustworthy computing initiative.

Then they sold it, and the new owner is now pulling a Train Simulator and going for thousands of dollars of DLC on Steam, which will likely kill the entire modding community that kept FSX alive once they realize they can sell it on Steam. Kind of sad to watch such a historical product be squeezed for the last dollars in slow motion.

X-Plane 11 looks absolutely fantastic, thankfully. Might be about time to pay FSX a final salute, and nice to support X-Plane as a reward for standing up to patent trolls.

Can confirm. XP11 is amazing. Though be prepared to pay a lot for addons.

There's actually two living forks. One is Dovetail Games' FSX: Steam Edition which you're talking about. The other is Prepar3d, sold by Lockheed. The license stipulates that it is "not for entertainment purposes", but otherwise it's basically just a port of FSX that works better in modern systems.

> "not for entertainment purposes"

That's kind of a weird stipulation: fun is prohibited.

The general consensus among the flight sim community is that their license from Microsoft forbade them selling it as a video game, to avoid them competing with first Microsoft and later Dovetail.

Licensing is weird sometimes.

There's actually a reason for that: Microsoft had a separate product called ESP [1] that was based on the Flight Simulator codebase that was marketed as a platform for doing industrial training simulations.

Development stopped with the dissolution of ACES, the Flight Simulator team, but Lockheed acquired rights to continue to develop MS ESP, which eventually became Lockheed's Prepare3d [2].

[1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc526948.aspx

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Flight_Simulator#Clo...

> What's doubly more impressive is that Bill Gates got directly involved with what is essentially a bug report

The reason why Ctrl-F means forward and not search in Outlook is bug report from Gates.

[1] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140715-00/?p=...

Thanks, Bill, for an accumulated days and days of wasted productivity over the decades...

complaining about wasted productivity, while commenting on HN

To be fair, which side companies take on international disputes (in this case a border) sometimes matters. e.g. all the craziness over Taiwan being part of China or not.

MS has had to take actions over border disputes in the past. Original releases of Windows 95 included a map that you could use to select/show your timezone. There was a dispute over the Pakistan/India border, and MS opted to later remove the map than attempt to correct it.

He didn't get directly involved; he forwarded a misrouted message to the relevant team.

The executives who are famous for e-mail (Bill Gates, Gabe Newell, Steve Jobs) are famous because they know exactly to whom to forward the mail.

Also Bezos: https://www.quora.com/Whats-it-like-to-receive-a-question-ma...

It's interesting certainly, but should we be impressed here? In the end, the team's time was wasted and a nonsense issue was escalated to the CEO.

escalated to the richest person on Earth.

They fielded the question and did a lot of work because they cared about the quality and details of their product at a level that I would agree with OP was impressive.

That it turned out to be a nonsense issue is immaterial to that judgement.

There are exemplary aspects to the story, but I think the only real lesson to be learned is "don't blindly spend a bunch of time/effort on an issue unless we're sure it's actually important".

Chasing bugs is a pain in the ass, and most of them are nonsense.

This kind of story makes it worthwhile, though. At the end of the day, you go home laughing instead of crying.

Yeah right?

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20091123-00/?p=...

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