Just as I was about to hit the road (driving the van to Vancouver for Expo 86), there was a small flurry of media coverage announcing the start of the second trip in the Computing Across America adventure. During the first trip, I had written a regular column in USA Today, so it was nice…

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I’ve always been something of a control-panel geek, and once I had committed to building the Winnebiko II and heading out again, the project became focused on console design. If I had learned anything from that first 10,000 miles, it was that the key to this whole adventure would be full access to all on-board…

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by Steven K. Roberts Columbus, Ohio July 4, 1986 A nation takes a day off from its countless private prisons—its careers, its roles, its lives of quiet desperation—and celebrates liberty. Liberty! Red, white, and boom! Company picnics, family gatherings, bratwurst in the park. Fireworks. Tall ships, the Lady, and 40,000 shells bursting over New York…

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This is an account of my talk at the 1986 National Online Meeting in New York City, including discussion of electronic publishing, the upcoming Winnebiko II, and resumption of my computerized recumbent bicycle travels around the US. The publisher was a significant force in the early epoch of online information retrieval; this article was prepared by…

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Packet Radio was a huge part of the second bike version; at a time before the Internet and cellular phones, it was amazing to have a way to wirelessly communicate with text. This was a subculture of the amateur radio community, and this special-interest publication picked up the story of my geeked-out bicycle. The console…

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In May of 1986 I flew to New York and gave a talk at the National Online Meeting about the bicycle adventures… both the 9,760 miles I had completed and the new one about to begin with vastly expanded technology.  I had a long-standing relationship with this publisher, having been on the “Online Information Retrieval”…

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This little piece marked the beginning of my move from CompuServe to GEnie, and was posted to my new “Computing Across America” area there. This was the start of what became known as the Miles with Maggie phase of my adventures. The photo above was from May 1986, and we had only been dating for…

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Before taking off on my bicycle in 1983, I had spoken at this conference about the application of personal computers to online information retrieval (Dialog and other systems which, for a dollar or more a minute, would disgorge bibliographic records and other structured forms of data). In 1986, I returned to New York with Maggie…

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The photo above shows me giving a talk about the Computing Across America adventure at the “Computers in the Ham Shack” event in a hot room during the 1986 Dayton Hamvention (photo by Dr. Jim Grubbs, KR6EN/ex-K9EI – SK, who was session moderator). The Worldradio article below is from the July issue, but the Dayton weekend…

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During the ’80s, I got into a kick of finding interesting computer applications in unfamiliar fields, then writing about them for my favorite magazines. Interesting stuff always happens at the boundaries between specialties, and this let me be a productive dilettante, surfing the knee of the learning curve without having to spend too much time…

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