Ancient Dreams

I am inclined to believe that all living beings that have seen a bird, an insect or even a leaf in the air, all have sometimes dreamed to fly. I think it would be very arrogant to believe that only humans dream to fly, but this is another story.

So, as soon as I had a decent computer, my Atari 400, which happened about 40 years ago (!), I coded a Flight Simulator in Basic language.

Of course I needed a yoke, or as we used to call it in Italy a “cloche” (…sounds French, right? ).

At that time I was attending the High School of Mechanical Engineering “Alessandro Volta” in Trieste (Italy) and we had a class called “Aggiustaggio”, which you may call “Metal Workshop”, where we learnt to use basic tools to produce metallic objects. It was already an endangered discipline, destined to extinction, but it originated from the noble art of “adjusting” mechanical parts to be properly “mated” together, such as a piston and a cylinder of a diesel engine for ships. Mind you that in our city we were making some of the largest engines in the World, you could comfortably stand inside one of such cylinders, so obviously they were made one by one with lot of manual adjustments. That industry is unfortunately also almost extinct in Trieste… (but this is another story)

Anyway, I asked the professor if instead of the usual silly exercises of making a simple metal box, I could design and make something more useful and interesting: a “cloche” for my flight simulator !

The Atari, like some other PCs of that times was already used for gaming, and you could connect up to 4 rotary controllers each one with a push button, which means I could connect 4 potentiometers and 4 switches to my own programs. This is how I was controlling the roll and pitch, two engines, flaps and undercarriage of my simulated airplane.

The professor could not resist, obviously bored to death himself by the standard syllabus, and so we built the two dimensional controller with two extra sticks for the engines and four switches in front.

It came out a beauty and worked very well and we enjoyed some after school hours of flying sessions at the school for the few people interested in such a strange hobby in the early 80’s.

Obviously the computational capability of an Atari 400 was archeologically pathetic compared to what modern kids are embedded in today, so I could only move a dot on the screen to represent my airplane, but I created a nice double sinusoidal landscape, even populated with trees between the valley and the zero temperature degrees line. It was all represented in simple but very clear assonometrical projection and a dot on the nadir of the airplane helped to understand its height. I had also an artificial horizon and a “pallina-paletta” instrument, better called “virosbandometro” or “turn and slip indicator”... I was only allowed to land and take off from the bottom of the valley...

My father’s colleague, Prof.Ing. Alessandro Canciani had a pilot license and gave me some basic ideas on flight dynamics and, as you have certainly observed, being my controls missing the pedals for the rudder, I implemented an automatic rudder formula correlated to the roll angle…

Of course the buzzer and sound synthesizer of the Atari 400 were perfect to generate the noise of the engines !

It is only a pity that I do not have that computer any more and I did not print the code… I only have the tape cassette that probably still contains the program, but who knows what I could get out of it after such a long time, even assuming I could connect a tape recorder to some kind of decoder.

So, this was a dream, and now it remains a dream, even if in the meantime I went much higher with my satellites.

Or maybe it never happened, as explaining such things now sounds so unreal and chances that somebody understands and believes what I wrote here are very small, but if you could patiently read until here...

...maybe you have also dreamed to fly as a kid !