From 1983 to 1991, I pedaled around the US on a computerized recumbent bicycle while living in the emerging online networks… in the process becoming the first “technomad” and sparking fascination with mobile connectivity. This page is the backgrounder for the collection of tales on this site, leading directly to my book, Computing Across America, its sequel, Miles with Maggie, the design of Winnebiko & BEHEMOTH, and the geeky boat projects that began a decade later. The stories are interleaved with extensive media coverage and other material that would be impossible in a physical book, and the site is packed with documentation, close-up views of radical cultural change, road stories from the sexy to the bizarre, and the stuff of geek fantasy.



The author at age 9

Computing Across America, Chapter 0

by Steven K. Roberts

1952 to 1983

Electronics was passion, obsession, raison d’etre. My identity lay in my basement laboratory; my happiness was a function of acrid solder smoke, blinkenlights, clacking relays, and that sweet mysterious crackle of shortwave radio. When I was 9, I had a contest with my friend Rusty, a chemistry fanatic: we each had a week to write down all the words we knew (or could find) in our respective fields. Pentode. Grid-leak. Crystal. Nixie. Hollerith. Ahh, those early ’60s in Jeffersontown, Kentucky.

Learning the resistor color code at age 9, building my inventory with TV repairman hand-me-downs

By the time I was 12, I was a ham radio operator known as WN4KSW, a skinny burr-headed prisoner of school. I was theoretically a smart little bugger, according to test scores, yet I kept hearing that I had attitude problems and wasn’t working up to my potential. With the exception of science fairs, my academic performance was apparently disappointing to authority figures.

An accurate assessment in 1963, when I was 10.

Oh well. I didn’t care: I had a secret life.

School received the minimum attention required, which wasn’t much. My real life was too important to dilute with homework: I was obsessed with relay logic, my lab, and the vague notion that if I prowled the magical world of electronic surplus with enough finesse, I might even be able to cobble together a computer with a few thousand 12AU7 triodes and an air conditioner. I amused myself with microphones in the ductwork and a parasitic phone line routed through an old black-crackle 19-inch equipment rack, listening to domestic goings-on by way of an 8-ohm primary coiled around the lab and an amplified loopstick antenna on my headphones (a primitive wireless audio system).

Blinkies… always loved blinkies…

Year after year I tolerated the time-waste of school, accepting patriotic brainwashing and sanitized history, superficial science and anachronistic literature selections — living not for girls, grades, and sports but for electronics, science fairs, and dreams of future laboratories. I was a social outcast, for my adventure was measured in volts, not adrenaline. When neighborhood bullies soaked my books with squirt guns one day, I ran home and attached a battery-powered 14,000-volt supply to a pair of squirt guns mounted side-by-side on a wooden stock… with salt water as the conductive ammo. As long as both streams hit someone before degenerating into droplets — WHAM!

My relationship with the neighbors subtly changed.

My childhood home in Jeffersontown, Kentucky (October, 1993 photo)

Empowering stuff indeed, but most seductive of all was radio… for it connected me to the outside.

It’s like a flashback now, recalling the chirpy Morse code of my unbuffered crystal oscillator built on a chunk of pine, the deeply imprinted smell of solder and flux vapors, and the magical noises emanating from the Star Roamer — as well as the Heaths and Hammarlunds that followed. Other people, other tongues, strange sideband squawks, political realities and cultural attitudes utterly unlike the Huntley-Brinkley Report that invariably accompanied dinner to the strains of Beethoven’s Ninth. I spent years gazing through this electronic window and building my tools; like the railroad tracks that passed near my house, radio became deeply symbolic of escape and movement. My physical adventures were confined to rural bike hikes; in my head, I could cruise the universe with a skyhook and a powerful collection of instruments ablaze with Nixie readouts, backlit dials, dancing meter needles, and round green CRTs.

My acoustic speech synthesizer in 1969

When I was a senior, I finally made it to the International Science Fair — a holy grail of sorts — with a homemade speech synthesizer. Having hit dead ends with other approaches after three years of frustrating work (tape loops, LC tank circuits, discrete transistor filters…), I built a working acoustic model of the vocal tract based upon X-rays of my own head. It even had a voice-change problem.

“I would live all my life in nonchalance and insouciance… were it not for making a living, which is rather a nouciance.” (Ogden Nash)

Graduation, anticlimactic and vaguely embarrassing, occurred in 1969 — when I was 16. I was academically ordinary, ranked in the middle of my class. There was such a gulf between learning and school that I doubtless responded with less than adequate concern to my parents’ repeated accusations that I was still not working up to my potential. It was an old story by then. (Of course, it did have its moments.)

Steve (on right) as a college freshman in early 1970, desperately wanting to need a headband like friend Brad Saylor. (Photo by Steve Orr, at about the time of our freight-hopping misadventure.)

I arrived at Rose Polytechnic Institute wide-eyed, heavy-laden with gadgetry and school supplies, ready to plunge into every college cliché I had ever seen in the movies. Philosophical bull sessions, scientific investigations of beer and other interesting substances, the mysteries of girls at last unveiled, haze-crazy fraternities, brilliant and slightly mad profs, all-night test-cramming sessions, eccentric nerds, emotional moments of discovery, huge computing machines, and through it all that magical rarified air of academia, of knowledge. Oooh… I got goose bumps all over my alma mater just imagining the richness and camaraderie of college life.

But engineering school turned out to be like going to art school and learning to paint by numbers. The infinitely interrelated universe was segmented into “subjects,” taught in isolation, out of context — despite the fact that humans are associative systems and generalists at heart. “Remember this, and this, and this; don’t worry, Steve, it will all fit together someday.” Nonsense! But there was something more insidious still: the motivation for learning was not curiosity, but fear of failure. That had the effect of reducing the educational process to a succession of panic-stricken study sessions. Learning was an incidental spinoff of staying out of trouble.

The author at 18

Besides… it was 1970 and getting high was more fun than studying. It even promoted that sweet illusion of wisdom, making it easy to feel good about donning a headband and quitting school halfway through freshman year. Before I knew it, I was on the road — waving my thumb from interstate shoulders and living out of a blue backpack emblazoned with the icon of peace.

Hitting the road in 1970 from Steven K Roberts on Vimeo.

As fun as that sounds, I soon tired of penniless drifting and began sampling jobs. I grew tan and strong as a deckhand on barges in Illinois and Minnesota; I briefly tried the dehumanizing factory life. I worked in a department store for a month, and installed telephone central office equipment on Army bases. I finally decided that maybe I needed a degree after all, but having cut the cord I now had to go for it on my own.

How else? I joined the Air Force… during the Vietnam war.

Colorized image of me as an Airman in Basic – June 1971

It didn’t take long to discover that despite the idealistic picture painted by the recruiter, I was not to be in research, this was not to be a great adventure, and there would be no free education beyond specialized tech school. Charged with the task of swapping black boxes in F-111 jet fighters, I huddled on the frozen Idaho flightline in my parka and rankled… confined to an intellectual straitjacket and supervised even in the private world of my dorm room.

He was an 8-striper with power. I was a misfit, earning both his respect and contempt with my confusing combination of technical knowledge and anti-war sentiments. When I heard rumors of his extended inspection visits to my room filled with lab equipment and communication gear, I built an intervalometer camera system that would record, on film and tape, anything that went on for 15 minutes after my door opened. Evidence mounted quickly: he was going through my desk — commenting out loud that “one way or another I’m gonna get this sonofabitch court-martialed… damn, he’s got his own die set.”

Pushing the envelope of an Air Force dorm room in 1972 (click to explore a much larger version)

I did make a splash that got him off my back, but satisfaction was short-lived. Pressure mounted from all sides — surprise inspections, harassment, disappearance of my cat, orders to get rid of my ham station and all the other “junk” in my room (I was designing an arbitrary signal synthesizer). Within 3 weeks I had orders to go to Guam in an unrelated career field, and I quickly understood that it was a death sentence. There were too many of ’em to fight. I saw my opening: we eventually agreed upon an honorable return to civilian life after a few months working in a precision measurement lab.

I hit RESET and tried again.

Field engineer, Singer Business Machines: a year’s education in how not to design computers. But my real attention was closer to home; in a Louisville apartment my techno-passions reached a new peak: by mid-1974 I had designed an 8008-based computer system jokingly named BEHEMOTH (for Badly Engineered Heap of Electrical, Mechanical, Optical, and Thermal Hardware), now on display in the Computer History Museum.

My homebrew computer in 1974

I started a moonlight parts business called Cybertronics to support my habit, hustling integrated circuits and related hardware, doling out plastic-bagged silicon goodies to the growing population of microprocessor junkies in those exciting early days of personal computers. What the machines lacked in capability they made up in class: card cages full of wirewrap boards, blinking front panels and massive power supplies, teletype machines, graphics with 8-bit DACs, hand-coded monitors and line editors…

Steven K. Roberts with homebrew 8008 system in Louisville apartment, sometime in early 1975. (Photo by Steve Orr)

Cybertronics became my full-time support. 1K (by 1 bit) static RAMs went down to $8.00 each, then to an unbelievable $3.50. The 8080 made a splash at $360 and I managed to find some I could sell for $250. The excitement was tangible; I devoured EDN and Electronics Magazine as most 22-year-olds would devour Penthouse — often staying up all night when some project was too exciting to put down. Universities could take a lesson from this: learning follows from passion as surely as pregnancy from fertilization.

And so was born an engineering firm. Word got out that some kid was designing with micros right there in Louisville, and within a few years I was building custom industrial control systems for Corning Glass, Seagrams Distilleries, Honeywell, and Robinson-Nugent — working out of a local industrial park and branching out… selling the new generation of IMSAI computer kits (What’s this world coming to? Any bozo can have a computer now…) and pushing chips by mail order. All the signs bespoke imminent wealth, but something was terribly wrong.

Working on a client project at Cybertronics in the Bluegrass Industrial Park, circa 1976 (photo by Lee Greathouse)

My all-nighters, when they happened, no longer had much to do with passion. They had to do with fear — of deadlines, of customers, of disaster. One had to do with tracking the ravages of an embezzling secretary; another with an ultimatum from a client; yet another from an expensive lesson about partnership. My favorite toys were turning into business equipment, and it was getting to be way too much like work.

My zone of geekery circa 1977

I cannibalized the company, escaped the industrial lease, and moved alone to a cavernous Victorian house where I continued tinkering, consulting, and writing magazine articles. A couple of years later, my girlfriend and I got pregnant, so we married and moved to Columbus in 1979 — where a software engineering job promised to fatten my bank account at last and buy me the space to do some real writing.

I signed a 30-year mortgage on a 3-bedroom ranch house in suburbia — an acre along the Scioto River. A beautiful girl-child was born. I commuted to work in a Honda station wagon. And in the cold, gray Ohio winter of 1980-81 I panicked, recoiling violently from the routine that had settled around me. My old computers were cobweb-shrouded, lying idle, while I had been reduced to writing boring software for a living and arguing with my boss about design methods. Imprisoned, frightened of the scope of the next change yet even more frightened of not making it, I quit both job and marriage, finding myself a lone homeowner in Genericsville, USA… then immediately slipping into debt.

My pre-technomadic geeky tomes

I dusted off the word processor and began. For three years I wrote a book a year and did tech-writing for local industry, filling in the gaps with articles about artificial intelligence, robotics, online information retrieval, emerging network communities, and microprocessors. My textbook, Creative Design with Microcomputers (Prentice-Hall), was a complete distillation of the Cybertronics era, carrying the exuberant message that “art without engineering is dreaming; engineering without art is calculating.”

My home writing office in 1981

Freelance writing was a license to be a generalist, but still… something was amiss. I had turned another passion into a business. I was working my ass off to pay for a house I didn’t like in a city I didn’t like, and every change seemed but a new trap, more insidious than the last. What I needed was a lifestyle that would combine all of my passions: computers, gizmology, ham radio, bicycling, romance, adventure, steep learning curves, the transcendence of the well-turned phrase, interesting people, the buzz of publicity, and most of all change — non-stop change — weaving through my life as naturally as breath.

1981 photo by Frankie Foster, with my first book

The story begins in March of 1983, in that house on the outskirts of Columbus…

Architectural inspiration for long-distance travel