Steve Roberts: Computing Across America

https://bikepacking.com/plog/steve-roberts-computing-across-america/

by duck • 3 years ago

98 27 3 years ago

macintux• 3 years ago

Steve was a friend of my mother, who was president of the International Human Powered Vehicles Association. I met some interesting people over the years, although not Steve, but he always struck me as the craziest (in a good way) dreamer.

zh33• 3 years ago

Plenty of crazies at Battle Mountain [0]. Not been, but it's on the bucket list.

[0] http://www.ihpva.org/whpsc/#:~:text=The%20World%20Human%20Po....

JKCalhoun2• 3 years ago

Looks like this year it's September 10 to 16.

https://travelnevada.com/event/world-human-powered-speed-cha...

hermitcrab• 3 years ago

Some videos on YT, including: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pJI7wUT0LY

zh33• 3 years ago

As a bit of background, the HUD is a Reflection Technology 'Private Eye' display, which went on to become the display technology behind the Nintendo Virtual Boy. Very neat devices, powered by an 8-bit 68HC05 and very much a self-contained display (though I generally drive them with a Pi these days).

JKCalhoun2• 3 years ago

I'd love to see a link to where you can get the hardware.

zh33• 3 years ago

As its over 30 years ago now, the closest you can get is probably Virtual Boys on eBay. Apaert from the pair I have, the only other ones I'm aware of are linked below.

https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/reflection-technolog...

http://www.loper-os.org/?p=752

jgrahamc• 3 years ago

Back in the 1980s I was utterly inspired by Steve Roberts and his bicycle and machines. I so wanted to find a way to buy a Radio Shack Model 100 in the UK. Seeing the BEHEMOTH in the Computer History Museum was an incredibly moving moment for me.

Oh, and I kept the copy of Mondo 2000 where there was an article about him because the combination of him riding that crazy computer-laded bike and the whole Mondo 2000 aesthetic made me think something special was happening. The particular issue had this plus Richard Stallman, Brian Eno, Timothy Leary and William Burroughs. And Joichi Ito.

aggressivefitch• 3 years ago

Yes i remember! Back in the 80s didn’t he document his journey and had a best seller . I bought that book. Was called “Computing Across America.” Started the whole digital nomad trend of trekking across long distances and blogging it etc etc. Hahaha I mean the guys bike had crazy inspector gadget type gadgets! Like a computer, a ham radio, a satellite link, and a fax machine of all things and then went 17k miles across the Us. totally rad for it’s time lol.

bittercynic• 3 years ago

Found that article! https://archive.org/details/Mondo.2000.Issue.04.1991/page/n3...

DonHopkins2• 3 years ago

Damn, what a great issue! Drinking from a technicolor fire hydrant of 90's dot-com zeitgeist.

rektide• 3 years ago

5th grade teacher told US about Steve Roberts & it was about all my adolescent mind could possibly handle. It was cool beyond cool. It greatly enlarged my idea of what the world & being an adult could be.

Computing with a keyboard integrated into the bars, & wired up with ham radio digital comms? And voice? And solar? On a bike? Greatest Of All Time. It was an early taste of the upcoming wearable and computing world.

Steve had some latter interesting "microship" projects, & rather more conventional boats. https://microship.com/

fernly• 3 years ago

You can see BEHEMOTH at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. It's just past the Lisa and opposite the Palm Pilot display.

The pictures in the catalog entry were taken in a warehouse. The bike is displayed much more nicely than these show.

https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/L2003.20...

walrus01• 3 years ago

1984 popular science magazine article: https://microship.com/online-on-the-road/

anactofgod• 3 years ago

Heh. I remember reading this very magazine and reading this article.

PaulDavisThe1st• 3 years ago

I wonder what happened to Maggie ...

mangamadaiyan• 3 years ago

That was my thought too.

fm26062• 3 years ago

I just sent a message on Steve's contact page asking what happened to Maggie. I'll post back here if I get a reply

fm26062• 3 years ago

Steve replied back and said they parted ways in the 90s though they remain friends to this day.

tabreu• 3 years ago

What happened when it rained?

timbit42• 3 years ago

Most of it was waterproof but he had a plastic sheet to put over the console to protect it from rain.

RistrettoMike• 3 years ago

Freaking love his story. Happy to see it here today :)

jpm_sd• 3 years ago

In some sense the wildest thing about this story is that you can do almost everything Steve's custom built rig was designed for, with just a smartphone.

youngNed• 3 years ago

I was struck by this too. The culmination of technology we have in smartphones blows my mind when i stop to think about it.

Something struck me while watching the video on that page though 'if you want me to find the correlation between cervical injury and stroke - it would take me about a minute to determine that, and who determined that and on what basis'

What would he have been using, at that time, to find that out?

DonHopkins2• 3 years ago

Sun Microsystems sponsored his Bikelab starting in 1990!

Here's a link to issue 1 from December 9, 1990:

https://microship.com/behemoth-bikelab-security-dipole/

And his intro announcement that I saved, and of course I subscribed to his fascinating Nomandness mailing list -- such fun times:

In article <65315@newstop.EBay.Sun.COM>, Dec 6, 1990, wordy@Corp (Steven K. Roberts) writes:

Hi...

Are you interested in ongoing reports from the bikelab here at Sun? I am working around-the-clock on BEHEMOTH (the successor to the 16,000-mile-old Winnebiko), a 350-pound recumbent bicycle with satellite earth station, GPS satnav, handlebar keyboard with thumb mouse, ultrasonic head mouse, SPARC IPC for CAD and mapping and file-serving, Hypertalk user interface to the trio of FORTH real-time systems, heads-up display on the PC LAN, biketop publishing environment, complete ham radio station, micro ecurity sensors, 54 speeds, regenerative and hydraulic braking, refrigeration and active helmet cooling system, speech synthesis and recognition, audio crosspoint network, MIDI, CDROM drive, 82 watts of solar panels, amateur television station, portable R&D lab, RF packet data link between manpack and bike, stereo, extensive camping gear, and so on.

Sun has become a major sponsor, providing workspace and facilities here on the Mt. View campus, and my job is to disseminate diverse information on bizarre human interfaces, portability, packaging, wireless networking, and the underlying nomadness that has kept the whole project alive for 7 years.

To facilitate publication of technical reports on the project, I have started an alias called Nomadness. If you'd like to receive ongoing updates, subscribe by sending a note to:

nomadness-request@bikelab.Corp

Thanks, and cheers from the unixycle lab!

Steve Roberts N4RVE x65037

trop• 3 years ago

Steve Roberts had a gig (maybe during the Winnebiko period) writing a column about his travels for CompuServe Magazine. In case you don't remember it, CompuServe was a walled-garden pre-AOL dialup internet site which included forums, games, and news. In this early-in-the-virtual era, subscribers to CompuServe also received each month, via snail mail, a glossy real-world periodical.

I sent Steve a fan email, and to my wonder, received a reply back. He struck me as a lovely guy, happy to correspond about the music and his general state of mind.

My memory is that an attraction of his column was that each was written from a different place, and described the adventures getting there, and being there. But then he got to the Florida Keys. And hung out at the Florida Keys for another column. And then hung out there for another column or so -- it was a pretty great place. And eventually, CompuServe dropped the column.

So nice to read the article on Steve Roberts, and fill out a bit these memories. Perhaps somewhere out there, someone has also written a memoir about CompuServe in its pre-Internet 1980s glory?

msla• 3 years ago

CompuServe was a walled-garden pre-AOL dialup internet site

I guess we've reached the point where all computer networking is "internet" now.

Steve Roberts: Computing Across America

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