This piece in the Santa Cruz Sentinel was published during the intense BEHEMOTH epoch, while I was still in the lab at Sun Microsystems. Anywhere can be home in the age of instant communications by Peggy R. Townsend Santa Cruz Sentinel February 15, 1992 Steven Roberts’ bike stands In a windowless gray office in the…

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This relic from the archives is from a time when life on the Internet involved longer attention spans than the social media of 30 years later. On the Technomads listserv, like many others, there were long-running discussions comprised of well-written impassioned commentary by net denizens, and some message threads were like interactive many-to-many magazines. The…

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I often described BEHEMOTH as a high-tech door-opener, a magical key that would let me into places that I would have never seen otherwise. This was one such case, offering a glimpse into the world of high-end video production. I showed up with the mobile-lab trailer, offloaded the bike, did a talk, and moved on……

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In January, 1992, I spent a week in Southern California to exhibit BEHEMOTH at the San Diego Electronics Show. The visit included a flurry of local media coverage, but the best part was visiting Qualcomm… which had created the bike’s OmniTRACS satellite email terminal (including custom tools to stitch it between the console Macintosh and…

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I brought BEHEMOTH to the San Diego Electronics show, where there was a wave of local media coverage (including this TV footage), and existing local connection with one of my favorite companies, Qualcomm. Here is a bit in the weekly business newspaper. But can he pop a wheelie on it? by Bob Mazzeo San Diego…

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During my speaking tour with BEHEMOTH (after the actual trip ended and just before starting the Microship project), I exhibited at the San Diego Electronics Show. One of my favorite sponsors was also in town (Qualcomm) and I made a few contacts at Scripps Institution of Oceanography that later led to 2 years at UCSD……

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Over the years, the term “technomad” has undergone a variety of interpretations, beginning in the mid-80s as a playful re-parsing of my “high-tech nomad” moniker and eventually defining a very diverse community of location-independent folks who use networking tools to enable open-ended travel. During my BEHEMOTH epoch, I corresponded with hundreds of people drawn to…

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by Steven K. Roberts Silicon Valley, California December 31, 1991 “The difference between art and work is that work has a deadline.”—David Berkstresser Post-Nomadic Stress Disorder… and Quest for Humans Damn, I hadn’t anticipated this… but I should have. Working obsessively for a few years on BEHEMOTH and then abruptly relocating it to the shores of…

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This Doctor Tomorrow column was written during the final phase of my time in the Bikelab at Sun Microsystems, and is a lovely take on the implications of the technology that was being packed ever more densely into the BEHEMOTH bicycle. The photo was taken by Maggie Victor against a wall at Sun, and this…

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by Fred Maia W5YI Report November 15, 1991 I first met Roberts a few years ago at the Dayton HamVention where he was selling autographed copies of his book which detailed his bicycle jaunts across the country. He had a booth right across from mine and I got a chance to periodically chat with him……

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