This came at a very intense moment… I was just about to leave the Bikelab at Sun Microsystems and drive to Omaha in order to do the RAGBRAI bicycle ride across Iowa, cranking out hundred-mile days with 10,000 other cyclists. As it happened, a mechanical breakdown interfered with this plan and I only managed a…

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This publication of the Los Angeles Macintosh User Group was a great venue for this general overview of the whole bike epoch (which also appeared in similar form in my various self-published pieces like the later From BEHEMOTH to Microship book). With a Mac Portable embedded in the bike’s console, controlled by ultrasonic head mouse…

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Steve Roberts with BEHEMOTH - Discover and Teekniikan Maailma

This one was a hoot, and really captured the buzz of the developing BEHEMOTH project at the Bikelab hosted by Sun Microsystems (in building MTV4). The photo session was amusing… that big green shot spanning the first two pages was a complex setup by Christopher Gardner, with a smoke machine and fancy lights all arrayed…

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This piece appeared during the final push at the Bikelab in preparation for RAGBRAI, which in retrospect was kind of a crazy idea (testing 3.5 years of work on a hugely heavy machine in the company of 10,000 cyclists cranking out hundred-mile days… what could possibly go wrong?). But public deadlines are a good thing,…

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On the eve of departure from the Bikelab at Sun Microsystems…  by Scott Leibs Information Week June 17, 1991 “People” section Steven Roberts is getting ready for a bike ride. It won’t be a typical jaunt, but then nothing about Roberts is typical. In mid-July, he will cross the state of Iowa on a bicycle that…

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Telebit was a fun sponsor of BEHEMOTH… not just providing a couple of modems (a tiny QBlazer as well as the exotic CellBlazer that I integrated with the Oki 491), but also hosting my FTP server and allowing one of their employees, Zonker Harris, to spend significant time in the bikelab. This article was in their…

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This is one of the best newspaper articles about BEHEMOTH and the underlying human tale… the writer is tech-savvy, and went on to write the pivotal book, Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer. The photo above is dated by a couple of cues… no cables coming out of the bottom of…

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Mondo 2000 was a brilliant cyber-culture magazine that set the stage for the more tech-focused Wired… and nothing was off-limits. Issues would cover experimental music, smart drugs, body modification, and even a crazy guy prototyping the technomadic life aboard a geeked-out bicycle. Seventeen issues were published, with the last in 1998; this one was in the…

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This article is a bit of a treasure in the timeline of BEHEMOTH. Published in the premier issue of Marlow RFD (subtitled “Motherboards and Apple Pie”), this was a 2-page spread that captured the insane, driven passion behind the extravaganza of geek obsession that was this final version of the bike. For three years I…

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I think this might have been my first contact with Gareth Branwyn, with whom I later worked (in 2010) on a 4-part feature on my mobile lab for the endlessly fascinating Make:Online, of which he was editor-in-chief. He also did a piece about my travels in Mondo 2000 a year after this short Futurist item.…

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