My mission as a USA Today columnist during the Computing Across America adventure was to report on interesting ways that people were using computers… and this one was more of a departure than usual from my technomadic and networking focus. I also wrote about computerized cows in a short Online Today article in early 1986. …

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Computing Across America, chapter 45 by Steven K. Roberts St. George, Utah November 10, 1984 We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, “I am suffering,” than to say, “This landscape is ugly.” Simone Weil I finally found the true meaning of desolation. Early in the journey, I…

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Steven Roberts playing flute in Arches National Park

Computing Across America, chapter 44 by Steven K. Roberts Arches National Park, Utah November 3, 1984 You have to be the reader’s mushroom. Judith of Telluride Judith and I walked amid sandstone formations that appeared as the whimsical carvings of some inspired god.  The rock, wind-sculpted for eons, was around us a museum of creative…

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This cover piece with short descriptive text came my way through the Computer History Museum, which received this as a donation in 2015. The photo itself is by Jeffrey Aaronson, with whom I spent a most interesting day in a shoot around Aspen, Colorado. Those stunning mountains are the Maroon Bells, and elsewhere in these…

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This is one of my favorite moments in the whole 17,000-mile trip… unexpected magic. The story first appeared as Chapter 13 in the print edition of my online adventure narrative on CompuServe. That page is reproduced below, but the better version, with lots of photos, is the book chapter in Computing Across America, available full-text…

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I remember this event with deep fondness… I often used to joke during my high-tech bicycling years that I was “an agent of Future Shock,” and this is one moment that epitomized that. The world was changing fast, and the tiny microculture of online denizens danced playfully in a whole different reality than the one…

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I published this book just before hitting the RESET button on the back of my head and taking off around the US on an open-ended technomadic bicycle adventure. It spun out of an article I wrote for Kilobaud called “Managing the Small System Environment,” discussing such things as related filing systems, backups, and other suggestions…

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I left the bike in Telluride and flew cross-country to speak at the Carolina Computer Expo in Charlotte. Here is a snippet from the book… A life online is a life outside the strictures of physics—at least the conventional physics that make a country seem big. The network is a village shaped like a map…

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Part of my column in USA Today while pedaling across the US…  by Steven K. Roberts USA Today October 18, 1984 NORWOOD, Colo. — We drove deep into southwest Colorado through the scenic San Miguel valley, past this little town and up a long unpaved hill. Rick Hollinbeck peered at the rutted road ahead, shrugged, downshifted,…

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Occasionally I rubbed elbows with the education community, and this little story triggered a few inquiries from teachers. I’m saddened by the front-page article about NASA’s quest for a teacher to fly on the Shuttle. Christa McAuliffe became that person, and was killed in the Challenger disaster on January 28, 1986. Judging by the dateline…

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