Early Years
Words’worth 1983 press release
It is strange, building this archive 35 years later, to see that this press release was put out just as I was also getting the wild idea to sell my house and move to a computerized bicycle. Clearly I was covering all bases, or was at least unwilling to burn bridges with a crazy technomadic…
Read MoreWords’worth Assistant Wanted
Freelancing alone in my Dublin house was becoming overwhelming, with debt, overload, frustration, and a sense of dread. I was desperate to find a solution, but the real one did not occur to me until a month and a half later, when a bike ride changed everything. I often speak of my time in Columbus as inspiring long-distance…
Read MoreWords’worth Documentation Services
Photo above: my girlfriend and I put a mobile office in a 27-foot Travco motorhome, and were preparing to take the freelance writing/consulting business on the road by Steven K. Roberts November, 1981 ARE YOU CAUGHT IN A DOCUMENTATION BIND? If so, you’re not alone. It’s getting mighty hard to find engineers with good writing…
Read MoreMulti-faceted writer
This small story in the local paper dates from less than a year after I moved to Columbus from Louisville, and is yet more than three years before I started on the Computing Across America adventure. I had just quit an engineering job, had a 4-month-old daughter, and was attempting to carve out a serious…
Read MoreStructured Design Attitude Problems
I’ve never pretended otherwise… I’m not a good employee. I’ve mostly managed to avoid it over the years, with a lack of economic stability to show for it, but what the hell… it has mostly been fun. This little snippet torn from an old notebook is near the end of my brief flirtation with being…
Read MoreCybertronics Offers Data Collection Systems
My best custom engineering contract back in the late ’70s was with Corhart Refractories (part of Corning Glass), and involved designing and building rugged industrial terminals for the factory floor. I wrote in detail about the design in my engineering textbook, and it was even profitable. One huge regret, though… after I shipped the first…
Read MoreMy Old Kentucky Home Computer
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…
Read MoreDaisy Wheel Printer Paleo-Graphics
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….
Read MoreMeteoric Growth
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…
Read MoreCybertronics in Louisville
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…
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