This article was a bit of a departure from my usual tech-freelancing beat of the early 1980s… instead of artificial intelligence or microprocessors, it was about air filtration problems in the Middle East. As with many such arcane topics, I became ever more intrigued as I researched the non-trivial problems and their technological solutions… this…

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My favorite geek-freelancing activity back in the early ’80s was heading off to a conference or trade show, then spinning tales of new technology for the readers of my favorite magazines. This one was at the other end of some spectrum from the Artificial Intelligence conference that led to my cover story in the same…

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This was my first substantial essay on AI, and fell out of an intensely stimulating two-week adventure at Stanford University that included the first International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, a LISP conference, schmoozing with some truly amazing authors, hanging out at Xerox PARC for an evening, and generally getting my brain expanded during every waking…

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This erotic tale of publishing jargon was the product of a giggly afternoon in 1981, inspired by editorial flirtation while I was writing my Industrial Design with Microcomputers textbook (Prentice-Hall, 1982, ISBN 0-13-459461-4). In that pre-Internet age, this had a brief life as one of those nth-generation photocopies that got passed around with furtive snickers… but I never posted it…

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This article spun out of the process of organizing the mess that had grown around my home computer system, but it had a delightfully unexpected result: shortly after publication, Prentice-Hall called and asked if I’d like to expand it into a book. Well, sure! I got to work on a more thorough discussion of the…

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This little humorous bit of geek philosophizing fell out of my hours of staring at the front panel of my homebrew 8008 system – a central fixture in my life from 1974 onward, evolving, of course, as ever more robust machinery became available. I first published it in the April-June 1978 issue of the delightful…

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by Steven K. Roberts East West Journal October, 1980 This little quiz was inspired by walking around a drugstore reading labels while my partner awaited a prescription. They didn’t bother with a byline, and I never sold to them again, but here it is from the back corner of an ancient media binder. (The goal…

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For many years I had a simple rule: all projects, whether hobby or consulting, had to have at least one associated magazine article. I didn’t always manage to accomplish this, but did so here; back in 1978, I landed an industrial control gig for Robinson-Nugent, and had to build a machine that would do insertion/withdrawal…

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