The Microship project was officially born in August 1992 while I was on a speaking tour with BEHEMOTH, announced via a prospectus posted on our FTP site, and fleshed out by a series of discussions on the technomads mailing list. By the Spring of 1993, I had located a development site -- the engineering building at University of California's San Diego campus. My early conceptualizations of this vessel were as ambitious as they were primitive, and the first two years saw a wide range of variations on the design, interesting learning curves, and (fortunately) a huge amount of development work on the embedded systems with our UCSD students. While the initial boat designs have faded into memory, those initial efforts in the multidrop FORTH control network are very much with us today. This collection of some 75 postings traces (sometimes with much retrospective amusement and occasional embarrassment) the childhood of the Microship project.

By April 1994, "downsizing" had become a dominant theme. I suddenly realized that I could satisfy the need for simplicity while also increasing the probability of getting on the water in my lifetime by buying and modifying a tiny commercial trimaran, the Fulmar-19. The project took an abrupt turn toward practicality, though a dramatic 2-week adventure through Puget Sound and the San Juans turned up some fundamental problems... leading to a quest for a bigger boat. The ten or so tales in this section carry the adolescent exuberance of a new vessel, new love, and big changes...

In well-intentioned overreaction, we fulfilled the quest for a suitable live-aboard multihull by acquiring Hogfish, a 30-foot folding trimaran, in April 1995 -- giving us room for two people, an eccentric yet fast boat, and a HUGE project on our hands. No longer able to fit in a 3rd-floor lab at UCSD, we leased a Silicon Valley building with the help of Apple sponsorship and dove in. Control and front end systems came online and industry became more involved than ever, while the TO-DO list grew well beyond human scale. In 35 updates covering two grueling years, the Microship project grows up... just before changing abruptly once again.

Something about Spring, perhaps... we embarked on a sort of second childhood in which youthful exuberance blended with the wisdom of age to produce something quite unlike either. By April 1997, the project morphed radically into a mad blend of the Fulmar Interlude and the emerging wireless era: a pair of networked canoe-scale micro-trimarans that integrated all existing systems while trimming two tons of nautical fat. There was collective rejoicing from the Nomadness mailing list, now about 2,500 strong, as we announced a return to tiny human-scale eccentric vehicles. In early 1998, with the first boat almost ready for test sails, we moved the whole project to our own lab in the woods on Camano Island, Washington. The growing archive of updates in this section should take us through final system integration and at last onto the water!