As Maggie and I headed out from Columbus on the second half of the Miles with Maggie expedition (Winnebiko II), there was a short bit on the local Channel 6 news. Video digitized from VHS off-air dub via Time Base Corrector at Harbor Digitizing. Winnebiko II on WTVN Columbus – July 11, 1987 from Steven…

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This is an unusual item, as it is under my byline. Usually I wrote for magazines, and the newspaper stories were by reporters. The excellent photos are by Janis Miglavs, taken in an Oregon coastal town in late 1986 while Maggie and I were pedaling down the west coast. The opening shot appears more sharply…

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by Lisa Lapin San Jose Mercury  News May 12, 1987 Steven Roberts describes himself as a typical high-tech junkie. He loves to tinker with his five computers, talk on his ham radio and play with his speech synthesizer in between freelance writing assignments. But he admits that his office is a bit unusual — a two-wheeled…

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This interview happened when I was visiting Dialog, a huge online database vendor that used to be a key part of my freelance business (before the bicycle expedition, I was an occasional “information broker,” doing research for clients). I spent a few months in Silicon Valley, with occasional flurries of media coverage. by Perry Lang…

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Before taking off on the bike in 1983, I was a heavy user of the DIALOG system… running a little freelance information-broker business as well as writing about it for various magazines including Byte, Online Today, EDN, and others. In those ancient pre-Google years, it was absolutely magical to have access to massive information resources,…

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During the early years of laptops, before they were universal commodities, a number of publications arose to focus on this new technology. Pico was not hugely well-known in this space, but I loved the name… they made a real effort to get the “picocomputer” term into common use, though like my own “Dataspace,” it didn’t…

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by Steven K. Roberts California Bicyclist April, 1987 High-tech touring… That phrase, if you’re a regular reader of glossy bicycle magazines, probably evokes colorful images of ultralight carbon-fiber frames and aerodynamic derailleurs. High tech means light and sleek, right? Well, what if I told you that I live full-time on a 220-pound recumbent, and am roughly…

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This was filmed in Palo Alto, after we made our trek down the Pacific Coast. The bike version is the Winnebiko II, still before the trailer or cellular phone.

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This has always been one of my favorite articles… it was an honor to publish in Whole Earth Review, produced by those brilliant folks in Sausalito who have brought us Whole Earth Catalogs and other treasures since 1968. The magazine ran from 1985-2002, and every issue was packed with ideas for self-sufficiency, new tools, and…

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After the trek down the Pacific Coast, we had a layover to continue work on bike systems, make progress on publishing projects, and figure out what next… and we stayed with a geek friend in Palo Alto who let us set up a lab in his ping-pong room.  by Arthur Hodges Palo Alto Times Tribune March…

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