Historical Documents
Son of a Sailor
This update is a bit of a divergence from my usual breed of randomness, which typically has something to do with S/V Nomadness, development facilities, technomadic gizmology, or random noodlings triggered by any of the foregoing. I’d like to dedicate this posting to my father, Ed Roberts, who passed away in 2005. The trip to…
Read MoreThe Quill Weather Vane of Swarthmore College
When I traveled to Louisville in 2005 to shut down the old family home after my father’s death, I had no idea of the depth and complexity of the history I was about to inherit. Suddenly I was the lone curator of artifacts spanning centuries… families, Quakers, Swarthmore, GE, the 1930s modeling scene in New…
Read MoreShacktopus – Paleo Smartphone and Shack-to-Go
by Steven K. Roberts, N4RVE Camano Island, WA – 2004-5 A decade after this project, while giving a talk at Google for an audience of engineers and executives, I was explaining the architecture of the 2005 Shacktopus system. The drawing below was sprawled across the two screens, and suddenly I heard a gasp from the…
Read MoreA Myth Busting Opportunity
I wonder how my life would be different if I had been more receptive to this intriguing invitation one day in April 2002. Long buried in a Eudora folder, deep in an ancient backup drive, here is a perfect example of those nexus moments in life when we make a huge decision without realizing it.…
Read MoreA Visit with AeroVironment
One of the more fun speaking gigs with BEHEMOTH was this one… presentations at the two AeroVironment sites (Monrovia and Simi Valley). I already knew the founder, Paul MacCready, through our shared interest in Human Powered Vehicles, and I remember being enchanted by his geek playground. They gave me one of their new Charger electric…
Read MoreEducation and Technomadics
This relic from the archives is from a time when life on the Internet involved longer attention spans than the social media of 30 years later. On the Technomads listserv, like many others, there were long-running discussions comprised of well-written impassioned commentary by net denizens, and some message threads were like interactive many-to-many magazines. The…
Read MoreBirth of the Technomads List Server
Over the years, the term “technomad” has undergone a variety of interpretations, beginning in the mid-80s as a playful re-parsing of my “high-tech nomad” moniker and eventually defining a very diverse community of location-independent folks who use networking tools to enable open-ended travel. During my BEHEMOTH epoch, I corresponded with hundreds of people drawn to…
Read MoreHustling the Scrounge – Juggling with Jef Raskin
At the very beginning of the BEHEMOTH project, I landed in Silicon Valley… and my first corporate host organism was Information Appliance, the playground of Jef Raskin (who started the Macintosh project at Apple in 1981, along with countless other fascinating creations over the course of his life). He offered lab space as I was…
Read MoreGeorge Anderson Roberts obituary
Uncle George, my dad’s brother (shown above with my mother in 1980), always fascinated me when I was a child. He had a sprawling electronics lab at his home in Swarthmore, an exotic and complex wonderland… though I think we only visited once from Kentucky and I desperately wanted to stay. His Christmas presents were…
Read MoreThe Fanatic Alphabet
In early 1978, as a geek/writer in Kentucky, I wrote an alternative phonetic alphabet and occasionally used it to mess with phone operators. I pretty much forgot about it other than posting on Usenet and an ancient blog until I saw that someone had done a book on this theme… so in the interest of…
Read More
You must be logged in to post a comment.