Steve, Author at Nomadic Research Labs

One of my early interests in “the computer hobby,” as it was called in the 1970s, was music composition and synthesis. My homebrew 8008 system (October 1974) was immediately paired with a Walsh-function waveform generator and top-octave synthesizer, and as those early heady years passed I turned my attention often to music tools. This article…

This article fell out of my first real consulting gig. I was 25, had gotten a bit of local notoriety for my 1974 homebrew computer system and other projects, and landed a contract with Honeywell to do the HVAC management system for the University of Louisville Campus. They did all the air handling stuff, of…

During the late ’70s, after total immersion in my homebrew 8008 system and a couple of lightweight machines, I needed a solid personal computer for writing, hacking, consulting projects, and music. I chose the Cromemco Z-2D as my primary machine, and added a custom memory-mapped (DMA) display, Diablo daisy-wheel printer, and various development tools. Somewhere…

Back in the late 1970s, I was blending my consulting business with a budding career as a freelance writer. One of my rules for myself was that every project had to yield at least one published article, and this one fell out of a machine that I built for Robinson-Nugent, a manufacturer of IC sockets…

In early 1978, as a geek/writer in Kentucky, I wrote an alternative phonetic alphabet and occasionally used it to mess with phone operators. I pretty much forgot about it other than posting on Usenet and an ancient blog until I saw that someone had done a book on this theme… so in the interest of…

This collection of optical sensing techniques fell out of some consulting I was doing in the mid-1970s, using embedded microprocessor boards to do machine control in industrial environments. I was particularly fond of this article, since their art department took my sheaf of hand-drawn sketches and turned them into a thing of beauty. I ended…

A relic from an evening in 1977 (despite the title on the image), using the Cromemco Z-2D computer, BASIC, and the Diablo daisy-wheel printer micro-positioning. This hung on my wall for years. This is the system….

Long ago, I wrote this little humor piece… with fantasies about my homebrew computer developing intelligence and getting bored with sitting around in a keyboard wait loop. This was its first publication, and it later appeared in Mensa Bulletin (June, 1979) and InfoWorld (November 10, 1980). Almost a half-century later, I am very conscious of…

This article in a local business paper caught a rare glimpse of Cybertronics around the beginning of its time in the Bluegrass Industrial Park east of Louisville… freshly escaped from a 2-bedroom apartment. I was 24, and the little business that had been supporting my computer obsession with mail-order parts and computer sales was turning…

This machine was introduced in 1977, and I was technically a dealer although I never sold one (which explains the Cybertronics label on the cover page). Prices ranged from $16K-70K, and it was a radical foray into the world of “small business computers” for a long-established company that had been focused on numerical-control machines and…

Posts by Steve

Polyphony Made Easy – Byte

Copy/Sort/Search: 8080 Data Manipulation

My Old Kentucky Home Computer

Increasing Solenoid Speed – Machine Design

The Fanatic Alphabet

Reliable Sensing with Optoelectronics – Machine Design

Daisy Wheel Printer Paleo-Graphics

Lament for the Semi-Sentient

Meteoric Growth

Cincinnati Milacron George – Your First Computer