Media – Winnebiko II
Bikepacking article – first digital nomad
This beautifully written 2023 article by Lucas Winzenburg in Bikepacking captures the flavor of my 17,000-mile adventure from the technological and cultural perspective of 40 years down the road. It has sparked considerable discussion and a few interview requests about digital nomad history, and I am honored to provide this link to the source. The…
Read MoreSuper Bike – Sun Tabloid
I always got a kick out of making it into the tabloids – fortunately, I’ve never been enough in the public eye for it to be a real problem, and a little breathless truth-stretching is an amusing break from the more staid technical media. This one did pretty well, though… other than claiming I built…
Read MoreTelephones and the Mobile Office – Omni
This seems quaint now, 30 years later… reading about the teething pains with cellular phones, cordless, and answering machines. Cellular, in particular, was such a complex jungle that I bicycled with a fat directory of service areas and their reciprocal agreements, as well as a yagi antenna the length of my arm to let me…
Read MoreOdds and End Users – Information Center
Just a little photo/caption from a computer magazine of the day, which also had articles about care of floppy disks and speculation about whether 1989 is the Year of the LAN. I was in the oddball stories section, along with a heavyweight champion punching out a computer. Oh, and I had a corner of the…
Read MoreHigh-tech Biker Also Motorhome Enthusiast
At the end of the Winnebiko II adventure covering both coasts of the US, my Computing Across America book finally came out… and I bought an ancient school bus in Florida to use as a mothership for an open-ended media tour. This became an adventure unto itself, covering over 16,000 miles (at about 6 MPG).…
Read MoreThe Bike that has Everything – Globe
THIS high-tech bike is home for traveling writer Steve Roberts. It has five computers, a satellite transceiver, two ham radios, a cellular phone, security system, refrigerator, fax unit, microfiche library and TV set. Steve runs his gadgets with solar power and uses the bike’s 36 gears to haul a 4-ft. trailer. He and galpal Maggie Victor, who has her own bike, rode 6,000 miles…
Read MoreEscape from the Office – Newsweek
By 1989, the idea of escaping the office and working at home was becoming quite the meme, sparking articles like this one in mainstream publications. I’m only including the text of the small part that discusses my bike, as well as the photo above (click page images to read full article). by John Schwartz…
Read MoreWinnebiko II on NHK – Japan
Filmed near Milpitas, California NHK March 24, 1989 (aired in June) This segment was part of a larger show that focused on emerging network communications, during a time when there was just beginning to be a transition between isolated online services and the then-embryonic Internet. I had recently completed the second phase of the bicycle…
Read MoreSteve Roberts: technobiker – IEEE Institute
This piece in the news supplement to the IEEE Spectrum (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) came at the beginning of the long Silicon Valley BEHEMOTH-building layover. Such publicity helped immensely during the team-building phase… without my übergeek volunteers, that final version of the bike would never have reached escape velocity. A Japanese translation of…
Read MoreReading, Writing, and Writing High-Tech Nomad – ASME News
This is just a quick little photo/caption piece from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. My father had been a member for his entire GE career, and I recall that he was delighted by this… especially with the photo from my visit to GEnie. Though I never followed in his corporate footsteps as I think…
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