by Steven K. Roberts January 9, 1974 It is hard to put into words the blazing intensity of my obsession with microprocessors in late 1973. I close my eyes a half-century later and can still FEEL them, little gold/ceramic dual-inline packages exponentially more capable than the simple logic devices that had become my creative toolkit.…

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8mm movie by Edward H. Roberts digitized by Steven K. Roberts Harrodsburg, Kentucky August, 1973 My father left behind a huge library of 8mm home movies from his various explorations ranging from 1940 to the mid-seventies, and I have been converting them to video and selectively uploading to YouTube. Sometimes I also join a relevant…

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Looking at these ancient photos now, I can see why I often got “written up” after room inspections. My bed, not shown here, was a crawl-in cave behind the workbench, and I had a cat named Bolivar living with me. The tall equipment rack was a homebrew HF transmitter with a pair of Eimac 100TH…

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I had an oddly contentious relationship with my superiors in the Air Force, long ago, when I was 19 and obsessively building a lab into my dorm room. In the middle of all that, a friend bought a new motorcycle and invited me to go for a ride… an adventure that led to a broken…

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1972 was a strange year for me… as a geeky 19-year-old college dropout in the Air Force, I was hardly on the sort of career path that I had imagined. The Vietnam War was in full swing, and I was stationed in Mountain Home AFB, Idaho… doing avionics maintenance for the F-111 fighter aircraft. Of…

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by Steven K. Roberts June 1971 – February 1972 In one of the stranger epochs of my life, I arrived very sick on the bus from Lackland AFB in the summer of 1971. I was immediately admitted to the hospital, where I stayed for 3 weeks with severe mononucleosis and anemia. The doctors were aghast…

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by Steven K. Roberts Lackland AFB May, 1971 (written in 2019) My odd decision to join the Air Force set an inevitable chain of events in motion, beginning with Basic Training at Lackland AFB in San Antonio. The date of this post is the beginning of this epoch in my life. Given that this was…

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In 1971, I made a strange decision… after about a year of being on my own, working as a deckhand on barges and then installing Autovon central-office phone systems on Army bases, I thought I’d join the Air Force as a way to get a degree (since I had cut the cord by dropping out…

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Here’s a random bit of history from the archives, unrelated to everything else on this site… picture me as a 19-year-old hippie geek in 1971, working for Sylvania as a technician installing Autovon central office telephone equipment at Fort Benning during the Vietnam war. Morbidly fascinated by the My Lai massacre trial, where William Calley…

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I’m going to have to dig deep to fill the 1970-71 era in these archives… few photos from that year have turned up, although there are a couple of excruciatingly embarrassing road journals that I should compress into a post in the interest of continuity. After abruptly leaving school and hitchhiking to Colorado in an…

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