He parlayed this expertise into an engineering gig at Hughes Aircraft. For his master’s thesis, Artwick wrote a pioneering program that could be used to generate three-dimensional graphics for a hypothetical flight simulator. He’d studied both electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and he was both a hardware virtuoso and a software savant. Then 25 years old, Artwick was uniquely positioned to profit from the coming wave. A handful of startups offered third-party software, but it tended to be buggy and not very useful. Most computers were homebuilt rigs assembled from components sold by various startups-a chassis here, a motherboard there.

Computer stores were as rare as unicorns, and if a bookstore had a computer section, it consisted of a single shelf sparsely populated with esoteric how-to manuals.ĭespite the arrival of the trinity, off-the-shelf computers were the exception. The previous year had seen the debut of the so-called trinity of turn-key microcomputers-the Apple II, Radio Shack TRS-80, and Commodore PET 2001. It was the summer of 1978, and the digital revolution was gathering momentum.

But he vividly recalls what happened during an otherwise forgettable lunchtime presentation and how it galvanized him to take action. Forty years ago, a software engineer with a passion for aviation taught desktop computers how to fly.īruce Artwick can’t remember exactly where or when he had the epiphany that launched the home flight-simulator industry.

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