Articles by SKR

Part of my column in USA Today while pedaling across the US…  by Steven K. Roberts USA Today October 18, 1984 NORWOOD, Colo. — We drove deep into southwest Colorado through the scenic San Miguel valley, past this little town and up a long unpaved hill. Rick Hollinbeck peered at the rutted road ahead, shrugged, downshifted,…

My brief few months as a USA Today columnist in 1984 opened a few doors during the bicycle trip… exploring interesting ways people were starting to use personal computers. This interview reveals what were then some novel concepts (and it was an awesome dinner!) by Steven K. Roberts USA Today October 4, 1984 ASPEN, Colo. —…

This was a bit of a departure from my usual material for the “Computing Across America” column in USA Today, but it was a hot-button issue while I was staying with a Lake City friend on my bicycle trip.  Steven K. Roberts USA Today September 20, 1984 Lake City, Colo. — Environmental issues are seldom…

The theme of my “Computing Across America” column in USA Today was a bicycle-borne quest to find interesting uses for personal computers, and I was quite fascinated by my first meeting with someone who was very serious about Big Stereo and home control. This is the tale of my visit with Dale Jackson in Baton…

One of the very best things about wandering around on a gizmological marvel with lots of media coverage is that the machine becomes a key that opens doors of all descriptions. I briefly shared orbits with people I would never have otherwise met, and some such encounters spawned journalistic spin-offs… like this one. Joe Ely…

Boy, does this one ever take me back… to the salad days of the emerging CompuServe culture that congealed around the “CB Simulator.” The quality of discourse was rich then, with a number of effective filters in place (only 140,000 subscribers to this largest of the online services) and considerable self-examination (“What does this mean?…

After the cover story of July 5, 1984, this was the first of my columns in the Money section of USA Today, which ran every other week until mid-November (when I hunkered down to write Computing Across America). This would have been awesome PR for said book, but I got caught up in editorial musical…

During the primitive beginning of my paleo-technomadic bicycle travels, the media was yet unfamiliar with the implications of the technology that was making it possible… even though vibrant communities were developing in various pre-Internet online services like CompuServe. After a small article about my trip appeared in USA Today (May 1, 1984), I got a…