Chapter 1: Computing Back Across America?
© 1986 by Steven K. Roberts
Nomadic Research Labs
Columbus, Ohio
May 28, 1986
Did you ever want to break the chains that bind you to your desk and
just take off, wandering the planet while making a living doing
whatever it is you love the most? Seems reasonable enough... and three
years ago I did just that. Since then, I have been living in an
electronic cottage on human-powered wheels, and through this book I’m
going to share my adventures with you.
We’ll be covering the burning issues of the day: Adventure, love,
danger, weird people, radical extremes of network living, full-time
travel, high-speed flights down mountain roads mottled with
Aspen-shade, mycological tone poems, unexpected ice caves, bizarre
contraptions, ham radio, satellites, a 200-pound bicycle worth $100 a
pound, real-life wizards, regional humor, outlandish microprocessor
applications, ridiculous comments, random controversy, moments of pure
anguish, and so much fun that something about it must be illegal. For
starters.
I am an agent of future shock—a high-tech nomad, a pedal-pushing
freelance writer head over heels in love with that sweet piece of
asphalt known as The Road. My
home, if I can be said to have one, is
Dataspace; my vehicle, the Wondrous Winnebiko.
My computer is a Hewlett-Packard Portable PLUS. Yes, I work for a
living: my business is to have a wildly exciting life and then tell
people about it.
(It’s a lousy job, but someone’s gotta do it.)
This is the first of a series—a collection of tales too strange to
predict and too diverse to summarize—an ongoing travelogue of a
romantic high-tech bicycle odyssey. As I move into the second 10,000
miles of this open-ended journey, I have switched networks and suddenly
find myself in a whole new community. (Why should I restrict my
nomadics to physical space? Howdy, neighbor.)
So lemme settle in here and take an angle-bracketed <sip> of
compu-booze, then tell you a story...
The First 10,000 Miles
In September of 1983, I sold my 3-bedroom ranch home in Midwestern
Suburbia and moved to an 8-foot-long computerized recumbent bicycle
bedecked with solar panels and enough gizmology to start a science
museum. I quickly discovered that this was not to be just another bike
tour. Using CompuServe as my link with the universe, I maintained a
full-time freelance writing business while pedaling a 9,760-mile
journey around the United States.
I lived for the moment—and I had many. During the 18-month adventure, I
fell in love both on and off-line, encountered a band of convicts in
the Maryland woods, sailed through the Gulf of Mexico, tempted fate
more than once, and learned more than I could have ever imagined. I
overheated in West Texas, froze my ass in Utah, discovered Key West
hedonism, and explored the California mystique. In Santa Fe, I saw
firsthand the symbiosis between hawker and gawker; in Crested Butte, I
witnessed a community so close that everybody’s biological cycles are
synchronized. I ate crawfish, oysters, and GORP—I prowled the country
seeking the exotic, sexy, and bizarre. The stories flowed like hot
breath, and soon the media turned its unblinking eye on me as a
high-tech curiosity, a peripatetic eccentric, a symbol of freedom.
“Charles Kurault on a bicycle,” gushed one local TV station as I
pedaled into a perfect cliche of sunset.
And I came to realize, looking back into the eyes of all those people
looking wistfully at me, that the greatest risk of all is taking no
risk. I noticed (once I stopped trying to score new states) that if you
think too much about where you’re going you lose respect for where you
are. And I dedicated myself to resolving the classic trade-off of
freedom versus security—a task I think I’ve finally accomplished.
Ah, and the people. When you look like something out of a nonviolent
version of The Road Warrior,
you tend to open a lot of doors. Even if
most of them turn out to be closets, the numbers are there: I spent
months probing the asymptotes of America and finding brilliance in the
oddest of places. I found communities ranging from the vaporous to the
ancient, and was tempted time and again by their seductive tug. And I
glimpsed the potential of life online, a life outside the strictures of
physics, beyond the limits imposed by image and prejudice. In the
electronic pub, brain meets brain and conversation ranges from the
bawdy to the sublime.
Life aboard the Winnebiko is
a life of extremes. I am at once a being
of cloud and soil, satellite and bicycle—living two simultaneous lives.
One is visceral, sweaty, attuned to every hill and headwind—the other
is ethereal, intellectual, an electronic interlocking of imagination
and communication. Something about the contrast casts both aspects into
sharp relief, and I suppose I’ve become something of an online
proselytizer.
9,760 miles. The journey wound down a year ago in the frenzy of
approaching book deadline—along with the exhaustion of some 2.5 million
pedal cranks and over 200 different beds. (Time for the commercial: the
book is called Computing Across
America: The Bicycle Odyssey of a High-tech Nomad.)
Anyway, the bicycle sat dormant for a few months in a Silicon Valley
attic, then found its way back to the land of its origins for six
months on the operating table. And that brings us (far too quickly) to
today.
The Next 10,000 Miles—A Sort of Prospectus
It’s happening again; I can feel it. Every daydream involves the Road;
any new purchase has to be something “bikeable.” The journey is
obsession, addiction, religion, and lifestyle of choice—by August I’ll
be rolling.
Ahh.
But there are differences a-plenty. The Winnebiko is again the substrate,
but it’s now layered with more exotic systems than ever. Not including
dedicated controllers and “smart logic,” there are four on-board
computers—along with a satellite data link, ham radio station, and
navigation equipment.
The biggest problem on the first trip involved time management,
something that affects nomads as much as it does executives. I spent
roughly half a business year pedaling—1,000 hours sitting alone on the
bike. I would cruise all day across American vastness, composing tales
in my head and itching to get my hands on the H-P Portable riding
behind me. (“Ah, such a chapter shall this be!”) But by evening I would
be tired and hungry and surrounded by people clamoring for stories...
and the day’s ideas would drift away like the smells of camp cooking,
gone without so much as a memory of the insights that spawned them.
Wasted.
And so the bike has become a rolling word processor. There are two
liquid crystal displays on the console in front of me, and a keyboard
built into the under-seat handlebars (eight buttons for text along with
various other controls). A dedicated 68HC11 microprocessor performs key
code conversion while attending to bicycle management tasks, decoding
finger combinations based upon an arcane letter-frequency-based coding
scheme. Whenever a valid character comes along, the 68HC11 passes it
off to a handful of CMOS logic that is interfaced to the guts of a
Model 100—making everything described so far look exactly like the
original Radio Shack keyboard. The net effect is a full screen editor
that I can control while pedaling.
But it doesn’t stop there. An RS-232 line allows text in the tiny 32K
buffer to be transferred to the 896K Hewlett-Packard system—and from
there to disk via the 3.5-inch floppy drive. Two modems cover all
combinations of pay phones and modular jacks, and a fourth processor
(CMOS Z80) handles AX.25 protocol control for packet data
communications through the 2-meter ham transceiver... which will soon
include an orbiting electronic mailbox known as Packsat. Of course, all
this takes power, and the original 5 Watt solar panel has been replaced
with a pair of 10 Watt Solarex units—along with 8 amp-hours of
Nickel-Cadmium battery to hold it all. Other electrical loads on the
Winnebiko II include twin air horns, lights, flashers, Etak electronic
compass, paging-type security system with distributed sensors, CB
radio, stereo system, cassette deck for dictation and music, digital
shortwave receiver, and the usual speed-distance-time-cadence
instrumentation.
“Are yew with NASA?” asked the Ohio farmer, slowly chawin’ tobacco
while peering at the strange apparition gleaming beside the small-town
pay phone.
“Sure,” I answered, looking up from my online session on the burning
pavement. “This here’s one o’ them Loony Excursion Modules.”
And Now...
It will be August before everything (including the business structure,
subject of my next article) is working well enough for me to abandon
this tacky apartment complex to experience, once again, the pure
exuberance of full-time travel. Once on the road, I’ll publish weekly
updates on GEnie; in the meantime, I’ll post an occasional message to
let you know how the preparations are coming. I welcome your responses,
suggestions, and invitations for the hospitality database (another of
the H-P’s jobs)—I can be reached via GEmail as WORDY.
And maybe somewhere, out there, we’ll meet. I’ll spend my life prowling
neighborhoods electronic and physical, pausing for months at a time to
explore and touch the magic. I guess that’s the point of all this... I
finally figured how to get paid for being a generalist. And I couldn’t
possibly do it without computers and networks.
Ain’t technology wonderful?