hn-classics/_stories/2004/8510839.md

---
created_at: '2014-10-26T11:50:45.000Z'
title: The Tools of Technomadics (2004)
url: http://microship.com/resources/technomadic-tools.html
author: jacquesm
points: 45
story_text: ''
comment_text: 
num_comments: 5
story_id: 
story_title: 
story_url: 
parent_id: 
created_at_i: 1414324245
_tags:
- story
- author_jacquesm
- story_8510839
objectID: '8510839'
year: 2004

---
From 1983 to 1991, I pedaled around the US on a computerized recumbent
bicycle while living in the emerging online networks… in the process
becoming the first “technomad” and sparking fascination with mobile
connectivity. This page introduces the High-Tech Nomad book that is
packed with gizmological details, massive cultural shifts, road stories
from the sexy to the bizarre, and the stuff of geek fantasy. The text
includes Computing Across America, Miles with Maggie, and technical
details of Winnebiko & BEHEMOTH… and in this online collection it is
interspersed with extensive media coverage and other details that would
be impossible in a physical book. The story begins here…  

### by Steven K. Roberts  
High-Tech Nomad, Chapter 0  
1952 to 1983

Electronics was passion, obsession, raison d’etre. My identity lay in my
basement laboratory; my happiness was a function of acrid solder smoke,
blinkenlights, clacking relays, and that sweet mysterious crackle of
shortwave radio. When I was 9, I had a contest with my friend Rusty, a
chemistry fanatic: we each had a week to write down all the words we
knew (or could find) in our respective fields. Pentode. Grid-leak.
Crystal. Nixie. Hollerith. Ahh, those early ’60s in Jeffersontown,
Kentucky.

By the time I was 12, I was a ham radio operator known as WN4KSW, a
skinny burr-headed prisoner of school. I was theoretically a smart
little bugger, according to test scores, yet I kept hearing that I had
attitude problems and wasn’t working up to my potential. With the
exception of science fairs, my academic performance was apparently
disappointing to authority figures.

Oh well. I didn’t care: I had a secret life.

School received the minimum attention required, which wasn’t much. My
real life was too important to dilute with homework: I was obsessed with
relay logic, my lab, and the vague notion that if I prowled the magical
world of electronic surplus with enough finesse, I might even be able to
cobble together a computer with a few thousand
[12AU7](https://amzn.to/1Mc9Adf) triodes and an air conditioner. I
amused myself with microphones in the ductwork and a parasitic phone
line routed through an old black-crackle 19-inch equipment rack,
listening to domestic goings-on by way of an 8-ohm primary coiled around
the lab and an amplified loopstick antenna on my headphones (a primitive
wireless audio system).

Year after year I tolerated the time-waste of school, accepting
patriotic brainwashing and sanitized history, superficial science and
anachronistic literature selections — living not for girls, grades, and
sports but for electronics, science fairs, and dreams of future
laboratories. I was a social outcast, for my adventure was measured in
volts, not adrenaline. When neighborhood bullies soaked my books with
squirt guns one day, I ran home and attached a battery-powered
14,000-volt supply to a pair of squirt guns mounted side-by-side on a
wooden stock… with salt water as the conductive ammo. As long as both
streams hit someone before degenerating into droplets — WHAM\!

My relationship with the neighbors subtly changed.

Empowering stuff indeed, but most seductive of all was radio… for it
connected me to the outside.

It’s like a flashback now, recalling the chirpy Morse code of my
unbuffered crystal oscillator built on a chunk of pine, the deeply
imprinted smell of solder and flux vapors, and the magical noises
emanating from the Star Roamer — as well as the Heaths and Hammarlunds
that followed. Other people, other tongues, strange sideband squawks,
political realities and cultural attitudes utterly unlike the
Huntley-Brinkley Report that invariably accompanied dinner to the
strains of Beethoven’s Ninth. I spent years gazing through this
electronic window and building my tools; like the railroad tracks that
passed near my house, radio became deeply symbolic of escape and
movement. My physical adventures were confined to rural bike hikes; in
my head, I could cruise the universe with a skyhook and a powerful
collection of instruments ablaze with Nixie readouts, backlit dials,
dancing meter needles, and round green CRTs.

When I was a senior, I finally made it to the International Science
Fair — a holy grail of sorts — with a homemade speech synthesizer.
Having hit dead ends with other approaches after three years of
frustrating work (tape loops, LC tank circuits, discrete transistor
filters…), I built a working acoustic model of the vocal tract based
upon X-rays of my own head. It even had a voice-change problem.

Graduation, anticlimactic and vaguely embarrassing, occurred in 1969 —
when I was 16. I was academically ordinary, ranked in the middle of my
class. There was such a gulf between learning and school that I
doubtless responded with less than adequate concern to my parents’
repeated accusations that I was still not working up to my potential. It
was an old story by then.

I arrived at [Rose Polytechnic
Institute](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose-Hulman_Institute_of_Technology)
wide-eyed, heavy-laden with gadgetry and school supplies, ready to
plunge into every college cliché I had ever seen in the movies.
Philosophical bull sessions, scientific investigations of beer and other
interesting substances, the mysteries of girls at last unveiled,
haze-crazy fraternities, brilliant and slightly mad profs, all-night
test-cramming sessions, eccentric nerds, emotional moments of discovery,
huge computing machines, and through it all that magical rarified air of
academia, of knowledge. Oooh… I got goose bumps all over my alma mater
just imagining the richness and camaraderie of college life.

But engineering school turned out to be like going to art school and
learning to paint by numbers. The infinitely interrelated universe was
segmented into “subjects,” taught in isolation, out of context — despite
the fact that humans are associative systems and generalists at heart.
“Remember this, and this, and this; don’t worry, Steve, it will all
fit together someday.” Nonsense\! But there was something more insidious
still: the motivation for learning was not curiosity, but fear of
failure. That had the effect of reducing the educational process to a
succession of panic-stricken study sessions. Learning was an incidental
spinoff of staying out of trouble.

Besides… it was 1970 and getting high was more fun than studying. It
even promoted that sweet illusion of wisdom, making it easy to feel good
about donning a headband and quitting school halfway through freshman
year. Before I knew it, I was on the road — waving my thumb from
interstate shoulders and living out of a blue backpack emblazoned with
the icon of peace.

As fun as that sounds, I soon tired of penniless drifting and began
sampling jobs. I grew tan and strong as a deckhand on barges in Illinois
and Minnesota; I briefly tried the dehumanizing factory life. I worked
in a department store for a month, and installed telephone central
office equipment on Army bases. I finally decided that maybe I needed a
degree after all, but having cut the cord I now had to go for it on my
own.

How else? I joined the Air Force… during the Vietnam war.

It didn’t take long to discover that despite the idealistic picture
painted by the recruiter, I was not to be in research, this was not to
be a great adventure, and there would be no free education beyond
specialized tech school. Charged with the task of swapping black boxes
in F-111 jet fighters, I huddled on the frozen Idaho flightline in my
parka and rankled… confined to an intellectual straitjacket and
supervised even in the private world of my dorm room.

He was an 8-striper with power. I was a misfit, earning both his respect
and contempt with my confusing combination of technical knowledge and
anti-war sentiments. When I heard rumors of his extended inspection
visits to my room filled with lab equipment and communication gear, I
built an intervalometer camera system that would record, on film and
tape, anything that went on for 15 minutes after my door opened.
Evidence mounted quickly: he was going through my desk — commenting out
loud that “one way or another I’m gonna get this sonofabitch
court-martialed… damn, he’s got his own die set.”

I did make a splash that got him off my back, but satisfaction was
short-lived. Pressure mounted from all sides — surprise inspections,
harassment, disappearance of my cat, orders to get rid of my ham station
and all the other “junk” in my room (I was designing an arbitrary signal
synthesizer). Within 3 weeks I had orders to go to Guam in an unrelated
career field, and I quickly understood that it was a death sentence.
There were too many of ’em to fight. I saw my opening: we eventually
agreed upon an honorable return to civilian life after a few months
working in a precision measurement lab.

I hit RESET and tried again.

Field engineer, Singer Business Machines: a year’s education in how not
to design computers. But my real attention was closer to home; in a
Louisville apartment my techno-passions reached a new peak: by mid-1974
I had designed an [8008-based computer
system](https://microship.com/homebrew-8008-computer-schematics)
jokingly named BEHEMOTH (for Badly Engineered Heap of Electrical,
Mechanical, Optical, and Thermal Hardware), now on display in the
Computer History Museum.

I started a moonlight parts business called Cybertronics to support my
habit, hustling integrated circuits and related hardware, doling out
plastic-bagged silicon goodies to the growing population of
microprocessor junkies in those exciting early days of personal
computers. What the machines lacked in capability they made up in class:
card cages full of wirewrap boards, blinking front panels and massive
power supplies, teletype machines, graphics with 8-bit DACs, hand-coded
monitors and line editors…

[Cybertronics](https://microship.com/cybertronics-flyers-from-1976)
became my full-time support. 1K (by 1 bit) static RAMs went down to
$8.00 each, then to an unbelievable $3.50. The 8080 made a splash at
$360 and I managed to find some I could sell for $250. The excitement
was tangible; I devoured EDN and Electronics Magazine as most
22-year-olds would devour Penthouse — often staying up all night when
some project was too exciting to put down. Universities could take a
lesson from this: learning follows from passion as surely as pregnancy
from fertilization.

And so was born an engineering firm. Word got out that some kid was
designing with micros right there in Louisville, and within a few years
I was building custom industrial control systems for Corning Glass,
Seagrams Distilleries, Honeywell, and Robinson-Nugent — working out of a
local industrial park and branching out… selling the new generation of
IMSAI computer kits (What’s this world coming to? Any bozo can have a
computer now…) and pushing chips by mail order. All the signs bespoke
imminent wealth, but something was terribly wrong.

My all-nighters, when they happened, no longer had much to do with
passion. They had to do with fear — of deadlines, of customers, of
disaster. One had to do with tracking the ravages of an embezzling
secretary; another with an ultimatum from a client; yet another from an
expensive lesson about partnership. My favorite toys were turning into
business equipment, and it was getting to be way too much like work.

I cannibalized the company, escaped the industrial lease, and moved
alone to a cavernous Victorian house where I continued tinkering,
consulting, and writing magazine articles. A couple of years later, my
girlfriend and I got pregnant, so we married and moved to Columbus in
1979 — where a software engineering job promised to fatten my bank
account at last and buy me the space to do some real writing.

I signed a 30-year mortgage on a 3-bedroom ranch house in suburbia — an
acre along the Scioto River. A beautiful girl-child was born. I commuted
to work in a Honda station wagon. And in the cold, gray Ohio winter of
1980-81 I panicked, recoiling violently from the routine that had
settled around me. My old computers were cobweb-shrouded, lying idle,
while I had been reduced to writing boring software for a living and
arguing with my boss about design methods. Imprisoned, frightened of the
scope of the next change yet even more frightened of not making it, I
quit both job and marriage, finding myself a lone homeowner in
Genericsville, USA… then immediately slipping into debt.

I dusted off the word processor and began. For three years I wrote a
book a year and did tech-writing for local industry, filling in the gaps
with articles about artificial intelligence, robotics, online
information retrieval, emerging network communities, and
microprocessors. My textbook, [Creative Design with
Microcomputers](https://microship.com/industrial-design-with-microcomputers-review)
(Prentice-Hall), was a complete distillation of the Cybertronics era,
carrying the exuberant message that “art without engineering is
dreaming; engineering without art is calculating.”

Freelance writing was a license to be a generalist, but still… something
was amiss. I had turned another passion into a business. I was working
my ass off to pay for a house I didn’t like in a city I didn’t like, and
every change seemed but a new trap, more insidious than the last. What I
needed was a lifestyle that would combine all of my passions: computers,
gizmology, ham radio, bicycling, romance, adventure, steep learning
curves, the transcendence of the well-turned phrase, interesting people,
the buzz of publicity, and most of all change — non-stop change —
weaving through my life as naturally as breath.

The story begins in March of 1983, in that house on the outskirts of
Columbus…

 

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