This beautifully written 2023 article by Lucas Winzenburg in Bikepacking captures the flavor of my 17,000-mile adventure from the technological and cultural perspective of 40 years down the road. It has sparked considerable discussion and a few interview requests about digital nomad history, and I am honored to provide this link to the source. The…

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A delightful interview with Australian cyclist Alee Denham in December 2016 led to this story, which can be read on his website, CyclingAbout. It ends with some commentary on what I would do differently now, always fun to contemplate given the stunning technological changes that have taken place.

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The caption reads:  Proto “Glass” hacker Steven Roberts and the “Brain Interface Unit” for his 1991 nomadic “BEHEMOTH” bike project. The BIU offered a heads-up data display (via The Private Eye), a head-gesture-controlled mouse, radio communications and entertainment audio, spot and flood lights, a rearview mirror, and even a helmet liquid cooling system. My BEHEMOTH…

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This lovely piece by Karl Smerecnik served as a reminder to press on… back when I was stuck in a deadlock between a lab in the Camano Island woods and the lovely Nomadness moored 2 hours away. I’m grateful to the author for motivating me with discussion of my own adventures. Read the full article on the…

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I love the Hack a Day site… always something interesting in the domain of geekery, with frequent nerdgasms. It was thus a treat to find my adventures featured one day in 2009 – including embedded video excerpts from my talk at Xerox PARC on March 14, 1989. This was early in BEHEMOTH development, and I…

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I was contacted in 2003 by Prestel, an “Art and Architecture Publishing House based in Munich,” asking if I would send some photos for use in a book by Sean Topham about portable architecture. Following their success with Xtreme Houses, this one would focus on a subject dear to my heart… highly mobile residences. I…

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This short snippet appeared in the Gadgets book of the Ripley’s World’s Weirdest series (by Mary Packard, Scholastic Paperbacks, October 1, 2002). I am honored to share page 45 with Dean Kamen, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the ACM1 expo a few years ago. During BEHEMOTH development, we had a code term…

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The long-term home for the bike, after 17,000 miles of adventure and hundreds of stage appearances in the years that followed, is the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. I love this place, and it’s truly worth a visit for lots of reasons besides BEHEMOTH… they have astounding treasures from all branches of the computer…

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Technokochevik - 1

I don’t speak Russian other than distant memories of a year in high school, so am alas unable to translate this… but it appears to be a substantial treatment of BEHEMOTH (judging by spot checks with Google translate). To create the Searchable PDF, I used the Russian OCR function… but since my own text editors…

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This delightful Hugo-nominated geek zine from the UK picked up the BEHEMOTH story and gave it a little sidebar, rearranged here for easier layout. Somebody Out There is More Superfluous than Us Plokta June 1, 1999 Tibs wrote to tell us about Steven K Roberts. Tiring of the office grind, he built the ultimate portable…

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