Industrial Design with Microcomputers book
This is here as a sort of “historical date stamp,” since things weren’t obsessively blogged back in the early ’80s. Shortly before I took off on the bicycle adventure, I spent most of a year writing a Prentice-Hall textbook on microprocessor system design for industrial control applications.
The photo above, by my old friend Steve Orr, shows me at work in my basement writing office during this epoch. The photo below shows the brilliant engineering graphics friend Bob Phare, who worked with me night after night after his day job in order to create all the ink-on-mylar drawings for the book:
Bob’s artwork was amazing, and I need to publish a best-of gallery in this archive if I don’t get around to digitizing the entire book.
Having no idea there was a completely unrelated field called “industrial design,” I gave the book that title… then realized my mistake and had it reprinted in softcover as Creative Design with Microcomputers… but the original hard-cover one tends to be easier to find in the used-book marketplace.
This is a press release I put out when the book was published, along with a few hits in the media. It had been a real labor of love, with impassioned writing about technology ranging widely from noise issues to artificial intelligence… a sort of meta-textbook. The book was well-liked… although never well distributed. My favorite review is over here and there are often copies on Amazon.
THE INFORMATION INSTITUTE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE — March 1, 1983
THE ART OF MICROSYSTEM ENGINEERING
Columbus, Ohio — Learning about microcomputer system design need never again be boring, thanks to a new book by consultant Steven K. Roberts. Published by Prentice-Hall, Industrial Design with Microcomputers is the first book to address the critical issues in microsystem engineering without becoming traditionally bogged down in Boolean logic, device comparisons, and the author’s favorite instruction set. Instead, this entertaining 488-page book deals in a spirited fashion with such subjects as the development of an initial design concept, hardware/software tradeoffs, environmental factors, customer relations, debugging, structured design, artificial intelligence, and the subtle relationships between art and engineering.
Hailed by reviewers as a revolutionary approach to teaching system design, this unusual volume avoids the classic trap of placing a formal distance between author and reader. The book is firmly rooted in real-world experience, and offers a comprehensive and sophisticated design philosophy that is directly applicable to a wide range of projects. This is reinforced by the author’s lack of emphasis on any particular device family, since specific CPU references are few and secondary to the book’s main themes.
A review of Industrial Design with Microcomputers in a recent issue of Assembly Engineering magazine concluded: “This may be the best $28.95 a control designer ever spent for an evening of reading and learning.” Providing a solid intellectual framework for the art of high-quality system design, this book has already become required reading in a number of engineering firms.
Available for $28.95 from The Information Institute.
Resident Publishes Book on Microcomptuer
Learning about microcomputer system design need never again be boring, thanks to a new book by Dublin resident Steven K. Roberts. Published by Prentice-Hall, Industrial Design with Microcomputers is the first book to address the critical issues in microsystem engineering without becoming traditionally bogged down in Boolean logic, device comparisons, and the author’s favorite instruction set.
Instead, this 400-page book deals with such subjects as the development of an initial design concept, hardware/software tradeoffs, environmental factors, customer relations, debugging, structured design, artificial intelligence and the subtle relationships between art and engineering.
Reviewers call this book a revolutionary approach to teaching system design, this unusual volume avoids the trap of placing a formal distance between author and reader. The book is rooted in real world experience, and offers a comprehensive and sophisticated design philosophy that is directly applicable to a wide range of projects.
Autographed copies are available for $28.95 from the author…
(Note: that piece came out the very day I had the idea to take off on a computerized bicycle. I date this post to correspond with the next one, just to keep things clear.)
Computer book written by Dublin man
A new book by Dublin resident Steven Roberts, Industrial Design with Microcomputers, deals with the development of an initial design concept, hardware/software tradeoffs, environmental factors, customer relations, debugging, structured design, artificial intelligence and the relationships between art and engineering.
The book may be purchased from The Information Institute [obsolete address redacted) (That was the name of a little online information retrieval consulting business I had for a while, but it didn’t last… by the time I took off on the bike six months later, my thoughts were elsewhere.)
