Standing on stage at COMDEX Europe in Amsterdam, dizzy with the sheer awesomeness of being there, I had no idea that less than a year after this speaking gig I would be pedaling down the East Coast of the US in a completely new technomadic life. So much for my crystal ball! I don’t really recall what I talked about, but my favorite topics during that epoch were online information retrieval, artificial intelligence, and ubiquitous microcomputers… so it was probably a rhapsody on all that. Mostly, I was having fun in Holland for a week or so with my friend John Stork (at left in the photo above), who owned the Louisville ComputerLand franchise. We rented that car and drove all over the place, sampled Amsterdam nightlife, and basically exulted in spending time in a place very different from America’s midwest.

Trends in Future Technology

by Steven K. Roberts
COMDEX Europe
November 11, 1982

This is me at age 30. Click for more photos taken at the same time, including a sweet shot of my 1981 home computer system.

Steven K. Roberts, President, Words’worth and Information Institute, Inc., Dublin, OH. The former president of Cybertronics, a custom microprocessor engineering firm specializing in systems design, Mr. Roberts is now a prolific writer of computer magazine articles and books, a consultant and speaker. As a consequence of a Byte article about on-line information retrieval, Mr. Roberts started doing research for clients — thus spawning a new company. The Information Institute, Inc. Mr. Roberts has authored several books: Industrial Design with Microcomputers, Prentice-Hall; Managing Microsystem Operations, Prentice-Hall: Micromatics, Scelbi Publications. His extensive list of publications includes magazine articles on artificial intelligence, on-line information retrieval and microprocessor technology. He has published in Byte, Electronics, InfoWorld, Popular Computing and other leading journals.

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