On this date, something huge happened… shaking me to the core. It was the Loma Prieta earthquake, and I was living in Santa Cruz, working on what would become BEHEMOTH. The HF ham radio in the trailer was working (Icom 725). We had no power for weeks, phones were out, and cellular was yet rare…

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These magazine articles from the early phase of BEHEMOTH development are kind of a treasure… I had not yet started posting the details to a mailing list, and there aren’t many documents that go into detail about the system design. My series in 73 Magazine was very liberal, editorially… so I was free to ramble…

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This little snippet from my Miles with Maggie series (#52) took place two months before the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake that shattered our newfound Santa Cruz complacency. The foreshock impressionistically recorded here was but a teaser… yet deeply intimate somehow, coming as it did on the edge of sleep. The impact on the psyche was…

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Just a little photo/caption from a computer magazine of the day, which also had articles about care of floppy disks and speculation about whether 1989 is the Year of the LAN. I was in the oddball stories section, along with a heavyweight champion punching out a computer. Oh, and I had a corner of the…

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For years I have been storing a small collection of media dubs in the professional U-matic 3/4″ format, and this 2-minute news story from July 23, 1989 was the first test of my new digitizing system. Maggie and I were renting a house in Milpitas with our friend David Berkstresser to start the BEHEMOTH project,…

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by Steven K. Roberts Milpitas, California July 20, 1989 Photo above: June Moxon with crew in Enchanted Slipper on Slimy Slope Eureka, California Kinetic Sculpture Race ’89 These are the times that make all the others worthwhile. Cold, misty wind. Surf rumbling in the dark; fresh thick Humboldt beer the color of night foaming in…

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At the end of the Winnebiko II adventure covering both coasts of the US, my Computing Across America book finally came out… and I bought an ancient school bus in Florida to use as a mothership for an open-ended media tour. This became an adventure unto itself, covering over 16,000 miles (at about 6 MPG).…

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They Call Him the Wanderer - Marketing Computers July 1989

Another little trade-journal snippet from early in the BEHEMOTH project (I was still calling it the Winnebiko III). by Tara Buckley Marketing Computers July, 1989 High-tech nomads are few and far between. To be one, a person must endure a grueling travel schedule and do without the comforts of home. Steven K. Roberts does both.…

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Technology UpdateVariation on X.25 Communication Provides Viable Alternative to Fragile Information Links By Steven K. Roberts InfoWorld June 26, 1989 Dataspace. For some it has become home — a not-land of beings whose locations are no more relevant than their alma maters. For others, Dataspace is a vaguely perceived substrate for electronic mail and on-line information…

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by Trudy E. Bell IEEE Spectrum Japan June, 1989 This covers work-in-progress on BEHEMOTH from a time just before moving to Santa Cruz. It is a translation of this article by Trudy Bell in the IEEE Institute of March, 1989.

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