Steve, Author at Nomadic Research Labs

I’m guessing at the precise date of this as the original is lost, but it is almost certainly late 1976 or early 1977. The little insert with the computer photo in the scan below was added much later when I posted this somewhere, and I am leaving it for context… but there is another post…

Way back in 1974, as a 22-year-old in Louisville, I started a small electronics business called Cybertronic Systems to help fund my growing microprocessor addiction and begin my escape from the employment treadmill that was already looming as a dangerous life habit. Within about a year, I was doing enough sales out of my apartment…

This Feghoot has been languishing in my old paper HUMOR file for decades, copied from a mid-70s issue of The Isolated M, a little ‘zine published for remote Mensa members by the late Harper Fowley of Louisville. (I proudly wore my fan club badge above to the occasional meeting, back when I was a pup.) I…

My favorite correspondent back in the Olden Days was my old friend Steve Orr, whom I met during my brief sojourn to Rose Polytechnic Institute in 1969. The file folders that we both kept all these years have yielded some interesting historical documents. This one is slightly silly, but revealing… Letter to Steve Orr by Steven…

I’m very fond of this piece from an obscure magazine published in Louisville in 1975-76. I believe only two issues were ever produced, and it was founded by Ernest Johnson, David Caudill, and friends. What I find fun about this is that it captured a glimpse of my life long before the bike, and even…

When I was 23, I began the second year of my mail-order electronics parts business, operating out of a 2-bedroom apartment in Louisville. This was profoundly liberating, especially as I had just taken the huge leap of quitting my job as a field engineer for Singer Business Machines. My own work was much more exciting; I…

by Steven K. Roberts Cybertronics Early 1975 This little relic is an echo of my 8008 system, and was published in Volume 1, Number 8 of Hal Chamberlin’s The Computer Hobbyist newsletter back in 1975… one of the first publications devoted to the personal computer community in the very early days. My little contribution was…

This is a minor bit of history – about a month after my 8008 first came online, I added a rudimentary hand-assembled editor to CYMON (Cybertronics Monitor) and used it to send a letter to my friend Steve Orr in Cincinnati (who scanned this document in 2018). The teletype hardware interface was described in my Electronics…

An Early Personal Computer (complete schematics) by Steven K. Roberts October 31, 1974 Below are the original schematics of the homebrew computer I built long, long ago… an 8008-based machine that resides in the Computer History Museum (that link will open in a new window and show you four professionally done, zoomable photos). The six…

This was my first published article, and fell out of my work on the homebrew 8008 system that is now in the Computer History Museum (that link includes four detailed photos). It’s basically a one-way simple UAR/T, though those devices were pricey back then… and this design induces the host micro to wait while a…

Posts by Steve

Cybertronics in Louisville

Cybertronics in 1976

An Excruciating Feghoot

An Impaired 1976 Letter

Portrait of the Computer as a Young Art Form – RagTimes

Cybertronics Catalogs – 1975

DEAL – Card Dealing Subroutine – Computer Hobbyist

Teletype Text Editor on 8008

Homebrew 8008 Computer – 1974

Baudot Teletype Interface – Electronics