Uncle George, my dad’s brother (shown above with my mother in 1980), always fascinated me when I was a child. He had a sprawling electronics lab at his home in Swarthmore, an exotic and complex wonderland… though I think we only visited once from Kentucky and I desperately wanted to stay. His Christmas presents were…

Read More

This article spun out of the process of organizing the mess that had grown around my home computer system, but it had a delightfully unexpected result: shortly after publication, Prentice-Hall called and asked if I’d like to expand it into a book. Well, sure! I got to work on a more thorough discussion of the…

Read More

This little humorous bit of geek philosophizing fell out of my hours of staring at the front panel of my homebrew 8008 system – a central fixture in my life from 1974 onward, evolving, of course, as ever more robust machinery became available. I first published it in the April-June 1978 issue of the delightful…

Read More

by Steven K. Roberts East West Journal October, 1980 This little quiz was inspired by walking around a drugstore reading labels while my partner awaited a prescription. They didn’t bother with a byline, and I never sold to them again, but here it is from the back corner of an ancient media binder. (The goal…

Read More

My first book, written for technicians encountering service issues with those newfangled microprocessors, was published in October 1980. This fell out of a series I wrote for Electronic Technician/Dealer magazine beginning with the August 1978 issue, and covered what was then a rather esoteric subject… driven by the recognition of this transformative technology as it…

Read More

For many years I had a simple rule: all projects, whether hobby or consulting, had to have at least one associated magazine article. I didn’t always manage to accomplish this, but did so here; back in 1978, I landed an industrial control gig for Robinson-Nugent, and had to build a machine that would do insertion/withdrawal…

Read More

In August 1980, I flew from Ohio to attend the Artificial Intelligence conference (AAAI) held at Stanford University, leading to my Byte cover story about AI. It was a huge adventure, connecting me with some incredible people… I have fond memories of an evening with astounding brains at Xerox PARC after playing with the Dolphin and Dorado bitmapped…

Read More

This small story in the local paper dates from less than a year after I moved to Columbus from Louisville, and is yet more than three years before I started on the Computing Across America adventure. I had just quit an engineering job, had a 4-month-old daughter, and was attempting to carve out a serious…

Read More

I’ve never pretended otherwise… I’m not a good employee. I’ve mostly managed to avoid it over the years, with a lack of economic stability to show for it, but what the hell… it has mostly been fun. This little snippet torn from an old notebook is near the end of my brief flirtation with being…

Read More

This 1979 piece was my contribution to a story about technological gifts for the upcoming Christmas season… they invited me to write it because of my activities as an active computer hobbyist since 1974. I discussed a few cartridge game systems, along with commentary about general-purpose machines. by Steven K. Roberts Louisville Today November, 1979…

Read More