This was my magnum opus from the pre-technomadic epoch… a wide-ranging textbook about industrial control system design. Foolishly, I originally named it Industrial Design with Microcomputers, not knowing there was an entire unrelated field called “Industrial Design”; this later softcover edition came with a title change that still didn’t quite capture the content, but was…

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This is here as a sort of “historical date stamp,” since things weren’t obsessively blogged back in the early ’80s. Shortly before I took off on the bicycle adventure, I spent most of a year writing a Prentice-Hall textbook on microprocessor system design for industrial control applications. The photo above, by my old friend Steve…

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My most ambitious book project of the pre-biking years was a textbook on industrial microprocessor engineering, published by Prentice-Hall… first as a hardcover (Industrial Design with Microcomputers) and then as a softcover edition (Creative Design with Microcomputers). It enjoyed a sort of cult-like status in some circles, as it was by no means a normal…

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Long out of print, this book was my first serious large-scale work… a full-size textbook published by Prentice-Hall, focused on industrial control system engineering. It encapsulated much of my twenties (back in the 1970s), when I was doing embedded factory automation and control systems on a consulting basis. It is not a normal textbook, and…

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Industrial Design with Microcomputers by Steven K. Roberts (Prentice-Hall, 1982), is a book designed to familiarize engineering managers with some of the applications of computer aided design (CAD). It offers examples of micros in industrial applications, and utilizes Cromemco systems — both hardware and software — throughout as the primary source from which data and…

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My first book, written for technicians encountering service issues with those newfangled microprocessors, was published in October 1980. This fell out of a series I wrote for Electronic Technician/Dealer magazine beginning with the August 1978 issue, and covered what was then a rather esoteric subject… driven by the recognition of this transformative technology as it…

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