 These early forays into BBS systems, combined with an early exposure to aviation through flight lessons in the early 1970s, as well as Bruce Artwick's Flight Simulator 1.0, brought about the concept of developing an aviation themed website in the closing months of 1996.The initial concept for AVSIM was the provision of articles and capture images of the flight simulation genre, collated into HTML format as a monthly magazine and packaged into a zip file.This was then made available for download among the major library servers on the Internet, including the file library system run and maintained at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, which was becoming one of the first major file libraries for flight simulation.