Articles by SKR Archives - Page 10 of 13

This appeared at a major cusp in my life; on September 28, I launched a bicycle trip that would become a career. But in the Before Times, I was a professional dilettante… prowling conferences and trade shows to research articles for magazines. Often they dovetailed with my own research interests; sometimes I was a translator who…

by Steven K. Roberts Online Today August, 1983 It was only, I suppose, a matter of time. The writing craft has always had to deal with plagiarism, the software business is grappling with piracy, and now the on-line industry has suddenly found itself face-to-face with database downloading. Yes, downloading. Is there about to be a major…

This was just a little quickie that challenged readers to make a logic diagram with an unusual constraint… no lines could cross! by Steven K. Roberts Computers & Electronics March, 1983 One of the basic elements of computer circuitry and digital logic is the gate. There are three fundamental types of gates: AND gate, whose…

I was on the online information retrieval beat for a few years, and this is just a quick little review of a 1982 book in the field. by Carol H. Fenichel and Thomas H. Hogan reviewed by Steven K. Roberts Interface Age October, 1982 The process of searching for an item buried somewhere amidst the world’s…

During my years of freelance writing before embarking on a life of technomadic adventure, my favorite mode of travel involved going to industry and academic conferences and trade shows, then writing about them for a variety of markets. Often this involved hobnobbing with those developing new technologies and then slanting my article towards those who…

This piece was scanned and added to the archive in 2018, over 35 years after it was written. The contrast is breathtaking, with the article explaining how to use dollar-a-minute online searching tools (1982 dollars!) to hunt for bibliographic results, patents, and other limited text-only resources. Google was unimaginable back then… by Steven K. Roberts…

This piece was a sort of editorial compromise… as I was getting more into sci/tech writing, I thought it would be nice to get a column or two going. I pitched “Element of the Month” to Mechanix Illustrated, figuring it would be good for about 8.5 years, but the editor told me to just pick…

I’ve had a rule since I started being a geek freelance writer in the early 1970s: everything is copy! In other words, build no contraption or tool (or even client project) without mining it for at least one magazine article. This of course helped feed my addiction to gizmology, and from the perspective of 2023,…

by Steven K. Roberts Technology Review January, 1982 My professional obsession in the early eighties was the intersection of the breathless microcomputer scene, cognitive science, the overhyped AI world, and publishing. I meandered through these communities as a geek dilettante, fueled by magazine assignments and my love of academic conferences… working on my textbook, sniffing…

One of my obsessions in the early 1980s was the emerging world of online databases… Lockheed’s Dialog system and others. Youngsters can think of this as paleo-Googlage, with very limited datasets (by today’s standards) centralized in corporate servers. This article in Byte covers some of the potential of these tools, and near the end takes…

Articles by SKR

Computers Simulate Human Experts

Database Downloading

Crossed Signals logic puzzle – Computers and Electronics

Online Searching: A Primer – Book Review

The Robotics Revolution – Mechanix Illustrated

On-line data retrieval – EDN

Lofty Uses for Lowly Elements – Mechanix Illustrated

Word Counting Utility for Writers – Byte

To Teach a Machine

Online Information Retrieval, Promise and Problems – Byte