Hey Doug, your topic just brought me back quite a lot of memories.
My interest in simulators started a bit earlier than you though, but at the beginning it was quite... imprecise. A part of me was enjoying civilian flight sims (back in time, it was still FS5), another part was amazed by the military sim EF2000.
Then came CFS1, and suddenly I learned that one could download and add planes to the sim ! That was amazing for me, but having no internet connection at home, I was downloading from the computers of the university

That was in 1997 or 1998... at that time, for me, the forums were still a TOTALLY unknown thing. However, for my CFS1 and FS98, two websites were clearly the main sources of addons for my sims:
- Keith Virtual Helipad
- Simviation
I was unaware that Simv had a forum at that time. In fact, the very first time I registered on a forum was somewhere in 2002 or 2003, on a french forum, because of another simulator called Falcon4.... then I learned that forums can be cool, and I went ahead some years later to register on SimV. I was already using FS9 at that time... it was on the 5th of October 2005, from what I can see in the registration email
