Microship

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/

Throughout the years, it has always been an inspiration to read up on Stephen K Roberts adventures! If you haven't yet, I strongly recommend exploring the rest of his website: https://microship.com/

Steven Roberts is a good inspiration for that; after computing across America on his amazing bicycles during the 80s, he has moved onto boats: https://microship.com/

Microship is the OG digital nomad and switched from bicycles to boats at some point: https://microship.com/ Sarah Steenland the Cruising Cartoonist has been working a digital artist job and raising a family on sailboats for years in the South Pacific: https://www.sarahsteenland.com/

(bike) Computing Across America, 1983-1987, https://microship.com/category/caa/page/5/ (boat) Building the Microship Trimaran, https://microship.com/microship/ > The Microship project spanned a decade, with three different labs and multiple design revisions... at last yielding an amphibian pedal/solar/sail micro-trimaran. This massive project was fueled by about 160 corporate sponsors and a team of brilliant geeks. His books, https://microship.com/product-category/publications/

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.

Love their side story about a historic tow path and his chance meeting of some convicts in the woods. The writing style is excellent. https://microship.com/towpath/

Oh, Microship and the Winnebiko! I'm so happy to see this obscure uberhacker on HN. Stories about this guy's exploits would be just the sort my ideal vision of HN would be exclusively populated by. Real Hacker news. His "A Decade of Microship Development"[1] is also well worth reading. [1] - https://microship.com/microship-development/

Steve's older site is Nomadic Research Labs, http://microship.com/. As he says, "Art without engineering is dreaming; engineering without art is calculating."

He's the technomadness guy, here's his recent stuff: http://microship.com/

His list of other technomads is also noteworthy: http://microship.com/technomads/index.html

It's worth bringing up the godfather of technomadics, Steven Roberts. He biked 17k miles on this "bike": http://microship.com/bike/index.html

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 <[email protected]>, 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…

Man, what a depressing story. From the "Amy" part of the story (https://microship.com/amy/): ###### 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…

His latest news: https://microship.com/

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

Steve Roberts built a chording keyboard into the handlebars of his recumbent bike. Unclear how much writing he really got done while riding the behemoth Winnebiko II around, but it was definitely a key event that inspired me towards computing & ubiquitous computing, made me see adulting as possibly being cool. https://microship.com/winnebiko-ii/

Hehe, I know what that reference is to. https://microship.com/behemoth/

1984 popular science magazine article: https://microship.com/online-on-the-road/

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.

This reminded me of a long ago fascination with Steven K Roberts, N4RVE, and Winnebiko He had a keyboard in the handles, 4 bits on each hand https://microship.com/bicycle-mobile-packeteering/

Pretty awesome. He had a binary keyboard, one button on each handlebar, and could type at 35 WPM using it. Impressive! I wonder if there is a market for that now, so people could text while biking. Or driving? https://microship.com/on-the-loose-in-dataspace/

This is one of the first websites I accessed in my life! Discovery Channel used to have a show about the internet in the 90s where it featured this guy and his bicycle, and the name stuck with me. So when I finally bought a modem it was one of the sites I accessed. I even remember linking it from my personal website back in 1996 or 1997. Here's the video: https://microship.com/microship-project-on-cyberlife-discovery-channel…

This is the Computing Across America guy, Steven K. Roberts. I saw only that book cover online as a young computer enthusiast and was inspired. Here’s a recent post from his blog and another article I found about his projects. Thanks for sharing. https://microship.com/digitizing-our-lives/ https://hackaday.com/2009/09/18/vintage-video-computing-across-america…

Have you ever seen Steve Roberts’ mobile engineering rig on his live aboard motor yacht? Might be of interest to you. https://microship.com/meet-datawake/

I worked my way through college by wirewrapping prototype boards. The last step was to get a magnifying glass and carefully inspect the board, pin by pin, looking for any stray tiny bits of wire, or any wire hairs sticking out. For soldered boards, I'd examine for any tiny solder bridges. Doing that would save a ton of debugging time :-) Since wirewrapping is a long obsolete technology, here's what the boards looked like: https://microship.com/wp-content/uploads/1974/07/wirewrap.jpg

I had occasion to meet Steve Roberts at the Dayton Hamvention when he had just published Computing Across America. I don't know anyone so delightfully dedicated to sheer hardware and software hacking fully integrated with one's lifestyle. [edit] and here is what may have begun his start: https://microship.com/combo-mowing-rig-1966-movie/

I wonder how many people nowadays know of Steven K. Roberts, the original "High Tech Nomad" starting in 1983: https://microship.com/high-tech-nomad-popular-computing/

I gave him the SPARCbook back in the day. http://microship.com/update-kentucky-rainstorm/

> people who cradle their smartphones in front of them while they drive I wonder how Steve Roberts (http://microship.com/bike/index.html) feels about them.