In the second year of Psion's existence, the company's founder, Sir David Potter, invited one of his former graduate students at Imperial College, Charles Davies, to join the company. Together they wondered what they could produce which would have the Wow! factor.
The answer was a flight simulator.
"It was done with the ZX81 which had all of 32K of RAM which had to be loaded off a tape and you played it on a television", recalls Potter, "then we produced it for the Sinclair Spectrum and we sold millions, we made a fortune out of that. It was brilliant."
"Because we were highly skilled, we knew the aerodynamics, and we actually used the real equations of aeroplanes, and we worked out the way to treat the view from the cockpit. We asked ourselves: 'So you're sitting in the cockpit what do you actually see?' And: 'How are going to simulate that on a screen?' "
"So we worked out the equations for transforming that three-dimensional geographic world onto a two-dimensional screen showing runways, lakes, trees, mountains, and everything", remebers Potter, "it was actually a beautiful bit of work. We had great fun. We worked out some of the theory together, and Charles implemented it in the computer. We produced a great product and sold millions."
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