Steve, Author at Nomadic Research Labs

This is just a quickie — I needed a way to carry four pumpkin pies when my girlfriend and I were heading for Thanksgiving dinner with her large family, and in keeping with my rule that all projects must have corresponding magazine articles, I sent it to Popular Science for their “Wordless Workshop” column. Apparently…

My best custom engineering contract back in the late ’70s was with Corhart Refractories (part of Corning Glass), and involved designing and building rugged industrial terminals for the factory floor. I wrote in detail about the design in my engineering textbook, and it was even profitable. One huge regret, though… after I shipped the first…

This was a quick little hack… way back in the day, a good and cheap tool for programming EPROMs in an S-100 bus computer was a board called the Bytesaver (by Cromemco). The only catch was that for every cycle, you had to shut the computer down and pull out the board. In a production…

I remember playing with a photovoltaic system long ago and dreaming of a day when energy production would be completely distributed, on every rooftop, using the energy grid as a marketplace… buying and selling power as availability and needs dictate. I’m sure I wasn’t the first to have such fantasies, but talk about it was…

by Steven K. Roberts Kyosk (Kentuckiana Mensa) August, 1979 Steve Roberts is the president of Cybertronics, Inc., a microprocessor engineering firm in Louisville. His articles about computers have appeared in Byte, Kilobaud, Creative Computing, Interface Age, EDN, ET/D, Electronics, and Machine Design. One of his roommates is a computer. To the arsenal of tools available for…

Cybertronics went through many phases, starting as a parts business, evolving into a computer store, then at last becoming a custom industrial control system design firm. These all overlapped, with me spread too thin most of the time, and in the later years it took the form of throwing myself into projects for clients while…

During the late ’70s, I was making a living on the fringes of the burgeoning personal computer industry with a crazy mix of freelance writing, custom industrial control systems, surplus parts mail-order house, and computer store. The big lesson in this is that one can’t be all things to all people, but the activity that…

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 as ever more robust machinery became available. I first published it in the April-June 1978 issue of the delightful General Bull News Sheet, then…

I published this back in 1979, when I was building custom micro-based systems for Corning Glass, Seagram’s Distilleries, and Robinson-Nugent. As a lone developer, I could not afford $20K for an Intel In-Circuit Emulator (ICE), so I invented this device to simulate the ROM in a target system by plugging in a ribbon cable reflecting…

This article resulted from some tinkering in my Z80 environment in the late 1970s, using a homebrew synthesizer for output (see photo below). I did not have any grounding in music theory, so the method described here was merely a starting point based on the recent publication of Fractal mathematics by Voss & Mandelbrot. Music…

Posts by Steve

Pie Carrier Design

Cybertronics Offers Data Collection Systems

Sweetening the Bytesaver – Kilobaud Microcomputing

Solar power can create new role for utilities – Kentucky Business Ledger

Appliance Computers – Mensa Kyosk

Cybertronics Security Tour System

The Cromemco Z-2D – review in Kilobaud Microcomputing

Lament for the Semi Sentient

Simplify Microcomputer Software Development by Simulating an EPROM – EDN

Fractal Music Composition – Creative Computing