I was on the online information retrieval beat for a few years, and this is just a quick little review of a 1982 book in the field. by Carol H. Fenichel and Thomas H. Hogan reviewed by Steven K. Roberts Interface Age October, 1982 The process of searching for an item buried somewhere amidst the world’s…

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My most ambitious book project of the pre-biking years was a textbook on industrial microprocessor engineering, published by Prentice-Hall… first as a hardcover (Industrial Design with Microcomputers) and then as a softcover edition (Creative Design with Microcomputers). It enjoyed a sort of cult-like status in some circles, as it was by no means a normal…

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During my years of freelance writing before embarking on a life of technomadic adventure, my favorite mode of travel involved going to industry and academic conferences and trade shows, then writing about them for a variety of markets. Often this involved hobnobbing with those developing new technologies and then slanting my article towards those who…

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This piece was scanned and added to the archive in 2018, over 35 years after it was written. The contrast is breathtaking, with the article explaining how to use dollar-a-minute online searching tools (1982 dollars!) to hunt for bibliographic results, patents, and other limited text-only resources. Google was unimaginable back then… by Steven K. Roberts…

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Long out of print, this book was my first serious large-scale work… a full-size textbook published by Prentice-Hall, focused on industrial control system engineering. It encapsulated much of my twenties (back in the 1970s), when I was doing embedded factory automation and control systems on a consulting basis. It is not a normal textbook, and…

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This piece was a sort of editorial compromise… as I was getting more into sci/tech writing, I thought it would be nice to get a column or two going. I pitched “Element of the Month” to Mechanix Illustrated, figuring it would be good for about 8.5 years, but the editor told me to just pick…

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I’ve had a rule since I started being a geek freelance writer in the early 1970s: everything is copy! In other words, build no contraption or tool (or even client project) without mining it for at least one magazine article. This of course helped feed my addiction to gizmology, and from the perspective of 2023,…

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Industrial Design with Microcomputers by Steven K. Roberts (Prentice-Hall, 1982), is a book designed to familiarize engineering managers with some of the applications of computer aided design (CAD). It offers examples of micros in industrial applications, and utilizes Cromemco systems — both hardware and software — throughout as the primary source from which data and…

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This ad ran in the New York Times, and included an announcement of my lecture about using microcomputers to assist with online searching. This was yet a radical concept… threatening to the vendors for fear of database downloading (detailed article at the link). Turn your micro into a database access machine Do you know about…

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by Steven K. Roberts Technology Review January, 1982 My professional obsession in the early eighties was the intersection of the breathless microcomputer scene, cognitive science, the overhyped AI world, and publishing. I meandered through these communities as a geek dilettante, fueled by magazine assignments and my love of academic conferences… working on my textbook, sniffing…

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