This 1998 audio cassette turned up almost a quarter century after it was recorded, long-forgotten in a broken box. It is a treasure, with a colorful and engaging discussion of the meaning of technomad, along with commentary on how others were adopting this term that I coined back in 1983 early in my bicycle adventure.…

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CQ Calendar, 1998 - cover

I got to be a “calendar boy” twice with the bike – first in the Bicycling Magazine calendar of 1988, and then a decade later in this one by CQ Magazine. I was in the Microship lab in Santa Clara at the time, not on the road… I remember riding BEHEMOTH to a nearby park…

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This issue came at a pivotal moment, as we shut down the Apple-sponsored lab in Silicon Valley and moved to the Pacific Northwest to begin the quest for new facilities. The full text of this also ran in Packet Status Register (TAPR) Issue #69. by Steven K. Roberts Nomadic Research Labs Bellingham, Washington December 31,…

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I love hamfests… they are like going home, on some geek level, with a sort of relaxed camaraderie that takes me back to those formative teen years as a Novice (WN4KSW), the sounds of CW in the static, and the warm glow of transmitting tubes. Of course, this is a fast-growing field… so I was…

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by Steven K. Roberts Nomadic Research Labs Santa Clara, California September 28, 1997 “I hate quotations.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson Canadian Road Trip Every now and then, we are presented with a choice: optimize efficiency or enjoyment (though the former is enjoyable and the latter, efficient). Such a trade-off appeared recently when it came time…

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Presenting at the Open Up! Event Natural Microsystems Boston, Mass Sept 18, 1997 Steve Roberts is the leading avatar of “nomadic connectivity,” the idea that technology should allow people to be highly mobile yet still in networked communication with others. From 1983 to 1991, he pedaled 17,000 miles around the United States on a computerized and…

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This little snippet of history came across my Twitterfeed exactly a quarter-century after it was published, so I screen-capped the ancient news bit from the UK and dropped it into the archive timeline. Transcription of the paragraph about our Microship-era geek romance is below. Good times… NTK – Need to Know (weekly high-tech sarcastic update)…

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Oh my. Y’all touched my soul. Two and a half months have flown since our pivotal tale of downsizing from Mighty Hogfish to a pair of micro-trimarans, and we have a lot of ground to cover in this issue… but first, I want to profoundly thank the 75 or so of you who took the…

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During the decade-long Microship project, I published 138 Status Reports as well as a few more general pieces in the old Nomadness series, and for years those were squirreled away in a rather obscure corner of my website as clunky text pages without any images. This one was pivotal, marking the transition from a frustrating…

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by Steven K. Roberts Nomadic Research Labs Santa Clara, California March 14, 1997 Arggggh! You called it a SINK! You have sealed your doom. David Berkstresser, referring to my foolish error in Issue #117 in describing the place where I’ll wash the dishes. One must never refer to a “sink” in a boat. We have…

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