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?
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.
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/
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.
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:
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?