Steve Roberts' site documenting his technomad projects, from computer-equipped touring bicycles to the Microship trimaran, and his writing on mobile computing.
HN commenters describe Roberts as an inspiration and the original digital nomad, recalling his 1980s bike computing across America and later boat projects.
Man, what a depressing story. From the "Amy" part of the story (https://microship.com/amy/):
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Suddenly Amy snuggled against me and asked if I had come back to stay with her forever. I held her and glanced over at Kay, but there would be no support from that quarter: she looked at me as if to say, “Tell her, Steve. Tell your daughter you’d rather ride a bicycle than be with her.”
I nuzzled Amy’s hair. “No, sweetheart, I have to leave soon.”
“I want you to stay here.” She wiggled and hugged. “I love you, Daddy.”
“Oh, Amy, I love you too.” My voice was on the edge of breaking. “But I’ll have to go in a couple of days.”
“Why?” She looked up at me, her face perfect and innocent, warm in the soft light of the living room. I had a sudden image of a winter night years before, cuddled with Kay before the antique fireplace of that old Victorian house in Louisville. We had gazed into the flames while sharing popcorn and hot apple cider, drawn together in the warm security of our endless love — the sense of family. Now I awkwardly held my little girl and tried to figure out how to explain the lure of technomadic adventure. They both waited for my reply.
“Honey, I have to travel — I have to… oh, I don’t know how to explain it. I’m riding my bike around the country and writing a book about it.”
“Why?”
“Well, it’s exciting. It’s fun.” I almost launched into a whole explanation of the freedom versus security trade-off, but I was talking to a three-year-old.
She smiled up at…
Sun Microsystems sponsored his Bikelab starting in 1990!
Here's a link to issue 1 from December 9, 1990:
https://microship.com/behemoth-bikelab-security-dipole/
And his intro announcement that I saved, and of course I subscribed to his fascinating Nomandness mailing list -- such fun times:
In article <65315@newstop.EBay.Sun.COM>, Dec 6, 1990, wordy@Corp (Steven K. Roberts) writes:
Hi...
Are you interested in ongoing reports from the bikelab here at
Sun? I am working around-the-clock on BEHEMOTH (the successor to
the 16,000-mile-old Winnebiko), a 350-pound recumbent bicycle with
satellite earth station, GPS satnav, handlebar keyboard with
thumb mouse, ultrasonic head mouse, SPARC IPC for CAD and mapping
and file-serving, Hypertalk user interface to the trio of FORTH
real-time systems, heads-up display on the PC LAN, biketop
publishing environment, complete ham radio station, micro ecurity
sensors, 54 speeds, regenerative and hydraulic braking,
refrigeration and active helmet cooling system, speech synthesis
and recognition, audio crosspoint network, MIDI, CDROM drive, 82
watts of solar panels, amateur television station, portable R&D
lab, RF packet data link between manpack and bike, stereo,
extensive camping gear, and so on.
Sun has become a major sponsor, providing workspace and
facilities here on the Mt. View campus, and my job is to
disseminate diverse information on bizarre human interfaces,
portability, packaging, wireless networking, and the…
Countries love tourists but they are often wary of anyone who wants to "steal the jobs". Best to be in a situation where you're earning income without having to "work" in the country.
If you have a popular web service or a iphone app you could do it.
Since you just got your degree, my honest advice is this:
1) Be slow to accumulate stuff.
2) Exploit the location where there are a lot of jobs, but do it in a way that doesn't tie you down for 4 years. Do consulting or contracting, or become a co-founder of a startup that is a virtual company such that the company isn't tied to this location. You need some good work experience, which you might have gotten while getting your CS degree, but if not, get it, and get some savings to boot.
3) Start practicing it. Start working away for a week at a time.
Unless you're independently wealthy you can't really spend your time without any work, so the challenge is working while you're a nomad.
You might find this useful:
http://microship.com/bike/index.html
I was 19 and worked for Prime Computer (minicomputers) in the Detroit office in 1980-81 as an OS Specialist. In May 1981 I worked the Prime booth in Chicago at NCC (National Computer Conference), where Xerox first introduced their Star system, running on Ethernet, also a Xerox invention.
https://microship.com/national-computer-conference-ncc-1981-byte/
We could see the Xerox booth from the Prime booth. It was always packed! Most of the vendors there that I remember were minicomputers and superminicomputers and used 80-character, 24-line terminals, band (line) printers with characters etched on a metal band, etc. The Xerox booth, with a b/w bitmapped display and printer, felt like something from the Jetsons.
It reminded me of Steven K. Roberts' "microship", an amphibian pedal/solar/sail micro-trimaran - https://microship.com/ .
He started his 'technomadic publishing' in the 1980s on bike. His BEHEMOTH was famous; it's on loan to the Computer History Museum. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dItCJUuFY4U for a BBC interview with him.
He then switched to microships for a while.
His description of struggling against the wind and current to make shore made me not want to go that route.
To be clear, Roberts's bike and microship were all human-powered, with no motor assist.
5th grade teacher told US about Steve Roberts & it was about all my adolescent mind could possibly handle. It was cool beyond cool. It greatly enlarged my idea of what the world & being an adult could be.
Computing with a keyboard integrated into the bars, & wired up with ham radio digital comms? And voice? And solar? On a bike? Greatest Of All Time. It was an early taste of the upcoming wearable and computing world.
Steve had some latter interesting "microship" projects, & rather more conventional boats. https://microship.com/