Steve, Author at Nomadic Research Labs

One of my obsessions in the early 1980s was the emerging world of online databases… Lockheed’s Dialog system and others. Youngsters can think of this as paleo-Googlage, with very limited datasets (by today’s standards) centralized in corporate servers. This article in Byte covers some of the potential of these tools, and near the end takes…

This article was a bit of a departure from my usual tech-freelancing beat of the early 1980s… instead of artificial intelligence or microprocessors, it was about air filtration problems in the Middle East. As with many such arcane topics, I became ever more intrigued as I researched the non-trivial problems and their technological solutions… this…

Photo above: my girlfriend and I put a mobile office in a 27-foot Travco motorhome, and were preparing to take the freelance writing/consulting business on the road by Steven K. Roberts November, 1981 ARE YOU CAUGHT IN A DOCUMENTATION BIND? If so, you’re not alone. It’s getting mighty hard to find engineers with good writing…

My favorite geek-freelancing activity back in the early ’80s was heading off to a conference or trade show, then spinning tales of new technology for the readers of my favorite magazines. This one was at the other end of some spectrum from the Artificial Intelligence conference that led to my cover story in the same…

I suppose, in retrospect, it was a tad cheeky for me to presume to review this book by one of the luminaries in the AI field, but fortunately I had a co-author. Jim Jenal was immersed in the Computer Science world when we became friends at the 1980 Artificial Intelligence conference at Stanford, and his…

This was my first substantial essay on AI, and fell out of an intensely stimulating two-week adventure at Stanford University that included the first International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, a LISP conference, schmoozing with some truly amazing authors, hanging out at Xerox PARC for an evening, and generally getting my brain expanded during every waking…

This erotic tale of publishing jargon was the product of a giggly afternoon in 1981, inspired by editorial flirtation while I was writing my Industrial Design with Microcomputers textbook (Prentice-Hall, 1982, ISBN 0-13-459461-4). In that pre-Internet age, this had a brief life as one of those nth-generation photocopies that got passed around with furtive snickers… but I never posted it…

by Steven K. Roberts Columbus, Ohio August, 1981 I have recently found myself spending a lot of time at AI conferences in journalist mode, and have become particularly enamored with image recognition. This fledgling pursuit has been sufficiently captivating to propel me into the study of human vision, and I have been fortunate to spend time…

Steve Roberts in 1981 clowning around with computer

From a binder of ancient negatives and matching contact sheets: The photo above is a goofy selfie from May, 1981, in my house in Columbus (old-fashioned EXIF date stamp in the form of a wall calendar from Radio Beijing). I was active on The Source as “wordy,” used DIALOG heavily for consulting, and was working…

These three contact sheets were tucked into an old binder, and under the microscope I could see that the calendar on the wall was April, with the first on a Wednesday. That happened in 1981, which makes sense – my first book (Micromatics) was released in late 1980, and I can see the fat but…

Posts by Steve

Online Information Retrieval, Promise and Problems – Byte

Middle Eastern Air Filtration – World Construction

Words’worth Documentation Services

National Computer Conference – NCC 1981 – Byte

Book Review – Principles of Artificial Intelligence – Nilsson – Byte

Artificial Intelligence – Byte

The Launch Meeting

Retinal Log-Polar Mapping – Solving the Rotation-Scaling Problem in Image Recognition

Photos from 1981

1981 Photos of Steven K Roberts and Cromemco Z-2D