Computing Across America, Chapter 5 by Steven K. Roberts October 1, 1983 Are yew with NASA?— Ohio farmer Passionately consuming a mug of iced root beer, I sat with Walt and Robby in a Mechanicsburg cafe. It was our first break. Outside, on a hot and sloping small-town main street, stood the bikes — mine the…

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Computing Across America, Chapter 4 by Steven K. Roberts September 28, 1983 You ante’d up to play Russian Roulette. — Tom Hoobyar The day of departure dawned. Like every morning, the clock radio blared banalities aimed at a mixed audience of commuters and housewives. The guy in the traffic copter talked about “three-block delays on 71”…

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Computing Across America, Chapter 3 by Steven K. Roberts September 27, 1983 Damn, that dude could survive a nucular war!— A Texan looking at the bike It was 2 a.m. on the morning of departure. I lay supine on hideous green sculptured pile, a murky carpet from the era of Doris Day that I had…

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The stories at this point in the timeline mention late-night wiring marathons. I found this drawing by Walt Spicker in the archives, the only known surviving documentation of the first version of the bike. This includes battery management, the little switch box under the seat for the lights, security system with pager, and CB. So…

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Computing Across America, Chapter 2 by Steven K. Roberts September 18, 1983  When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to the practical bum is…

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At the beginning of this crazy adventure, there was very little media coverage. Although I secretly feared that the trip would be aborted (by knee, bike, or financial problems), I rhapsodized at length, exhausting my friends with impassioned ramblings about beating the freedom-security trade-off and testing the viability of the information society by breaking the…

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This appeared at a major cusp in my life; on September 28, I launched a bicycle trip that would become a career. But in the Before Times, I was a professional dilettante… prowling conferences and trade shows to research articles for magazines. Often they dovetailed with my own research interests; sometimes I was a translator who…

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This was my magnum opus from the pre-technomadic epoch… a wide-ranging textbook about industrial control system design. Foolishly, I originally named it Industrial Design with Microcomputers, not knowing there was an entire unrelated field called “Industrial Design”; this later softcover edition came with a title change that still didn’t quite capture the content, but was…

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This was a hugely pivotal article in my unfolding adventure. First, the author unwittingly named the whole escapade, and second, this was published just before launch. That meant that almost every CompuServe subscriber had a heads-up that there was a guy on a computerized recumbent bicycle taking off around the country, posting tales online (paleo-blogging)…

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This was a delightful find, deep in a stack of old papers… a press release I issued six weeks before departure. Mixed in with a bit of breathless hype are some glimpses of the state of technology at the time, and why this was uncharted territory. (The first actual publication about the adventure was already…

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