This is one of the best newspaper articles about BEHEMOTH and the underlying human tale… the writer is tech-savvy, and went on to write the pivotal book, Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer. The photo above is dated by a couple of cues… no cables coming out of the bottom of…

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by Steven K. Roberts Silicon Valley, California May 28, 1991 “Daddy toys!”— concise assessment by Julia Selfridge, age 2,upon being introduced to BEHEMOTH for the first time. Well, there are now 49 days to departure, and I’m in the D phase of the PFD phenomenon that most concisely describes my work habits (Procrastination Followed by Despair).…

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David Berkstresser and Cecil be da Mill

Photo: David Berkstresser at Cecil, the Rockwell milling machine in the Bikelab. (Cecil be ‘da Mill) 3:15 AM. It’s becoming a familiar time — a favorite one, even. This time of day, there are few commercials on the radio to disrupt the back-to-back jams. There are no phone calls, few stray beeps from the SPARC,…

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by Steven K. Roberts Silicon Valley March 21, 1991 You know, sometimes this whole thing seems deliciously insane. Off the deep end. Wigged out… big time. It seldom appears to me in that light, fortunately, but occasionally I have a moment of shifted perspective — perhaps while lying under this monster trying to reach a…

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Mondo 2000 was a brilliant cyber-culture magazine that set the stage for the more tech-focused Wired… and nothing was off-limits. Issues would cover experimental music, smart drugs, body modification, and even a crazy guy prototyping the technomadic life aboard a geeked-out bicycle. Seventeen issues were published, with the last in 1998; this one was in the…

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This article is a bit of a treasure in the timeline of BEHEMOTH. Published in the premier issue of Marlow RFD (subtitled “Motherboards and Apple Pie”), this was a 2-page spread that captured the insane, driven passion behind the extravaganza of geek obsession that was this final version of the bike. For three years I…

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I think this might have been my first contact with Gareth Branwyn, with whom I later worked (in 2010) on a 4-part feature on my mobile lab for the endlessly fascinating Make:Online, of which he was editor-in-chief. He also did a piece about my travels in Mondo 2000 a year after this short Futurist item.…

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The blur of late nights and frenzied days since the last report in this series has yielded a hinged mezzanine in my RUMP, new wiring harness headers, a nifty mounting tower for the RUMP control processor, progress on the new seat/steering system, and countless little nudges of recalcitrant hardware toward the Road. The ROAD. It’s out…

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Economist Magazine cover, Feb 2, 1991

This article appeared as BEHEMOTH was being feverishly readied for departure from the Bikelab hosted by Sun Microsystems. A couple of the mentioned items were not completed by launch time (the shocker to the seat and the variable-reluctance motor-generator that I was planning to use for regenerative braking), but this is a pretty level-headed magazine…

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Compute! was published from 1979 through 1994, covering all platforms until becoming a PC-only publication in 1988. The link at the beginning of that sentence will take you to a much more substantial history of the magazine, including full text of many articles. I was saddened to learn just now that the author of this…

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