I remember the first time I played WB 2.7xx. I'd flown every box sim game since the B17 on the Intellivision, and thought I'd found heaven, and decided I'd not be leaving my home office ever again, other than to eat/sleep.
Shortly thereafter, while working on the QA team for a game called Rainbow 6 (the first one), another player heard me extolling the virtues of this Warbirds game, and how incredible it was. He mentioned that some of the same people who created it had split off and were making an even better variant, and it was in beta, called Aces High.
Mind. Blown.
What screwed with my head the most wasn't how much better AH was than the current WB, in every area, from graphics, to view systems, controls, whatever - it was the tiny size of the download. I forget exactly how large the client was for the beta then, but it seemed impossible for such a game to come out of such a small sized file.