271 lines
14 KiB
Markdown
271 lines
14 KiB
Markdown
---
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created_at: '2014-10-26T11:50:45.000Z'
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title: The Tools of Technomadics (2004)
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url: http://microship.com/resources/technomadic-tools.html
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author: jacquesm
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points: 45
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story_text: ''
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comment_text:
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num_comments: 5
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story_id:
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story_title:
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story_url:
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parent_id:
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created_at_i: 1414324245
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_tags:
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- story
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- author_jacquesm
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- story_8510839
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objectID: '8510839'
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year: 2004
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---
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From 1983 to 1991, I pedaled around the US on a computerized recumbent
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bicycle while living in the emerging online networks… in the process
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becoming the first “technomad” and sparking fascination with mobile
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connectivity. This page introduces the High-Tech Nomad book that is
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packed with gizmological details, massive cultural shifts, road stories
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from the sexy to the bizarre, and the stuff of geek fantasy. The text
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includes Computing Across America, Miles with Maggie, and technical
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details of Winnebiko & BEHEMOTH… and in this online collection it is
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interspersed with extensive media coverage and other details that would
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be impossible in a physical book. The story begins here…
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### by Steven K. Roberts
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High-Tech Nomad, Chapter 0
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1952 to 1983
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Electronics was passion, obsession, raison d’etre. My identity lay in my
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basement laboratory; my happiness was a function of acrid solder smoke,
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blinkenlights, clacking relays, and that sweet mysterious crackle of
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shortwave radio. When I was 9, I had a contest with my friend Rusty, a
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chemistry fanatic: we each had a week to write down all the words we
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knew (or could find) in our respective fields. Pentode. Grid-leak.
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Crystal. Nixie. Hollerith. Ahh, those early ’60s in Jeffersontown,
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Kentucky.
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By the time I was 12, I was a ham radio operator known as WN4KSW, a
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skinny burr-headed prisoner of school. I was theoretically a smart
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little bugger, according to test scores, yet I kept hearing that I had
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attitude problems and wasn’t working up to my potential. With the
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exception of science fairs, my academic performance was apparently
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disappointing to authority figures.
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Oh well. I didn’t care: I had a secret life.
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School received the minimum attention required, which wasn’t much. My
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real life was too important to dilute with homework: I was obsessed with
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relay logic, my lab, and the vague notion that if I prowled the magical
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world of electronic surplus with enough finesse, I might even be able to
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cobble together a computer with a few thousand
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[12AU7](https://amzn.to/1Mc9Adf) triodes and an air conditioner. I
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amused myself with microphones in the ductwork and a parasitic phone
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line routed through an old black-crackle 19-inch equipment rack,
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listening to domestic goings-on by way of an 8-ohm primary coiled around
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the lab and an amplified loopstick antenna on my headphones (a primitive
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wireless audio system).
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Year after year I tolerated the time-waste of school, accepting
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patriotic brainwashing and sanitized history, superficial science and
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anachronistic literature selections — living not for girls, grades, and
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sports but for electronics, science fairs, and dreams of future
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laboratories. I was a social outcast, for my adventure was measured in
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volts, not adrenaline. When neighborhood bullies soaked my books with
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squirt guns one day, I ran home and attached a battery-powered
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14,000-volt supply to a pair of squirt guns mounted side-by-side on a
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wooden stock… with salt water as the conductive ammo. As long as both
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streams hit someone before degenerating into droplets — WHAM\!
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My relationship with the neighbors subtly changed.
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Empowering stuff indeed, but most seductive of all was radio… for it
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connected me to the outside.
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It’s like a flashback now, recalling the chirpy Morse code of my
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unbuffered crystal oscillator built on a chunk of pine, the deeply
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imprinted smell of solder and flux vapors, and the magical noises
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emanating from the Star Roamer — as well as the Heaths and Hammarlunds
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that followed. Other people, other tongues, strange sideband squawks,
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political realities and cultural attitudes utterly unlike the
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Huntley-Brinkley Report that invariably accompanied dinner to the
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strains of Beethoven’s Ninth. I spent years gazing through this
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electronic window and building my tools; like the railroad tracks that
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passed near my house, radio became deeply symbolic of escape and
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movement. My physical adventures were confined to rural bike hikes; in
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my head, I could cruise the universe with a skyhook and a powerful
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collection of instruments ablaze with Nixie readouts, backlit dials,
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dancing meter needles, and round green CRTs.
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When I was a senior, I finally made it to the International Science
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Fair — a holy grail of sorts — with a homemade speech synthesizer.
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Having hit dead ends with other approaches after three years of
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frustrating work (tape loops, LC tank circuits, discrete transistor
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filters…), I built a working acoustic model of the vocal tract based
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upon X-rays of my own head. It even had a voice-change problem.
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Graduation, anticlimactic and vaguely embarrassing, occurred in 1969 —
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when I was 16. I was academically ordinary, ranked in the middle of my
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class. There was such a gulf between learning and school that I
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doubtless responded with less than adequate concern to my parents’
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repeated accusations that I was still not working up to my potential. It
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was an old story by then.
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I arrived at [Rose Polytechnic
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Institute](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose-Hulman_Institute_of_Technology)
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wide-eyed, heavy-laden with gadgetry and school supplies, ready to
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plunge into every college cliché I had ever seen in the movies.
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Philosophical bull sessions, scientific investigations of beer and other
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interesting substances, the mysteries of girls at last unveiled,
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haze-crazy fraternities, brilliant and slightly mad profs, all-night
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test-cramming sessions, eccentric nerds, emotional moments of discovery,
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huge computing machines, and through it all that magical rarified air of
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academia, of knowledge. Oooh… I got goose bumps all over my alma mater
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just imagining the richness and camaraderie of college life.
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But engineering school turned out to be like going to art school and
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learning to paint by numbers. The infinitely interrelated universe was
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segmented into “subjects,” taught in isolation, out of context — despite
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the fact that humans are associative systems and generalists at heart.
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“Remember this, and this, and this; don’t worry, Steve, it will all
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fit together someday.” Nonsense\! But there was something more insidious
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still: the motivation for learning was not curiosity, but fear of
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failure. That had the effect of reducing the educational process to a
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succession of panic-stricken study sessions. Learning was an incidental
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spinoff of staying out of trouble.
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Besides… it was 1970 and getting high was more fun than studying. It
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even promoted that sweet illusion of wisdom, making it easy to feel good
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about donning a headband and quitting school halfway through freshman
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year. Before I knew it, I was on the road — waving my thumb from
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interstate shoulders and living out of a blue backpack emblazoned with
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the icon of peace.
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As fun as that sounds, I soon tired of penniless drifting and began
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sampling jobs. I grew tan and strong as a deckhand on barges in Illinois
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and Minnesota; I briefly tried the dehumanizing factory life. I worked
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in a department store for a month, and installed telephone central
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office equipment on Army bases. I finally decided that maybe I needed a
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degree after all, but having cut the cord I now had to go for it on my
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own.
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How else? I joined the Air Force… during the Vietnam war.
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It didn’t take long to discover that despite the idealistic picture
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painted by the recruiter, I was not to be in research, this was not to
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be a great adventure, and there would be no free education beyond
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specialized tech school. Charged with the task of swapping black boxes
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in F-111 jet fighters, I huddled on the frozen Idaho flightline in my
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parka and rankled… confined to an intellectual straitjacket and
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supervised even in the private world of my dorm room.
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He was an 8-striper with power. I was a misfit, earning both his respect
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and contempt with my confusing combination of technical knowledge and
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anti-war sentiments. When I heard rumors of his extended inspection
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visits to my room filled with lab equipment and communication gear, I
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built an intervalometer camera system that would record, on film and
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tape, anything that went on for 15 minutes after my door opened.
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Evidence mounted quickly: he was going through my desk — commenting out
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loud that “one way or another I’m gonna get this sonofabitch
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court-martialed… damn, he’s got his own die set.”
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I did make a splash that got him off my back, but satisfaction was
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short-lived. Pressure mounted from all sides — surprise inspections,
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harassment, disappearance of my cat, orders to get rid of my ham station
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and all the other “junk” in my room (I was designing an arbitrary signal
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synthesizer). Within 3 weeks I had orders to go to Guam in an unrelated
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career field, and I quickly understood that it was a death sentence.
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There were too many of ’em to fight. I saw my opening: we eventually
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agreed upon an honorable return to civilian life after a few months
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working in a precision measurement lab.
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I hit RESET and tried again.
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Field engineer, Singer Business Machines: a year’s education in how not
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to design computers. But my real attention was closer to home; in a
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Louisville apartment my techno-passions reached a new peak: by mid-1974
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I had designed an [8008-based computer
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system](https://microship.com/homebrew-8008-computer-schematics)
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jokingly named BEHEMOTH (for Badly Engineered Heap of Electrical,
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Mechanical, Optical, and Thermal Hardware), now on display in the
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Computer History Museum.
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I started a moonlight parts business called Cybertronics to support my
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habit, hustling integrated circuits and related hardware, doling out
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plastic-bagged silicon goodies to the growing population of
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microprocessor junkies in those exciting early days of personal
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computers. What the machines lacked in capability they made up in class:
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card cages full of wirewrap boards, blinking front panels and massive
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power supplies, teletype machines, graphics with 8-bit DACs, hand-coded
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monitors and line editors…
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[Cybertronics](https://microship.com/cybertronics-flyers-from-1976)
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became my full-time support. 1K (by 1 bit) static RAMs went down to
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$8.00 each, then to an unbelievable $3.50. The 8080 made a splash at
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$360 and I managed to find some I could sell for $250. The excitement
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was tangible; I devoured EDN and Electronics Magazine as most
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22-year-olds would devour Penthouse — often staying up all night when
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some project was too exciting to put down. Universities could take a
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lesson from this: learning follows from passion as surely as pregnancy
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from fertilization.
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And so was born an engineering firm. Word got out that some kid was
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designing with micros right there in Louisville, and within a few years
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I was building custom industrial control systems for Corning Glass,
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Seagrams Distilleries, Honeywell, and Robinson-Nugent — working out of a
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local industrial park and branching out… selling the new generation of
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IMSAI computer kits (What’s this world coming to? Any bozo can have a
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computer now…) and pushing chips by mail order. All the signs bespoke
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imminent wealth, but something was terribly wrong.
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My all-nighters, when they happened, no longer had much to do with
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passion. They had to do with fear — of deadlines, of customers, of
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disaster. One had to do with tracking the ravages of an embezzling
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secretary; another with an ultimatum from a client; yet another from an
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expensive lesson about partnership. My favorite toys were turning into
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business equipment, and it was getting to be way too much like work.
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I cannibalized the company, escaped the industrial lease, and moved
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alone to a cavernous Victorian house where I continued tinkering,
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consulting, and writing magazine articles. A couple of years later, my
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girlfriend and I got pregnant, so we married and moved to Columbus in
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1979 — where a software engineering job promised to fatten my bank
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account at last and buy me the space to do some real writing.
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I signed a 30-year mortgage on a 3-bedroom ranch house in suburbia — an
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acre along the Scioto River. A beautiful girl-child was born. I commuted
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to work in a Honda station wagon. And in the cold, gray Ohio winter of
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1980-81 I panicked, recoiling violently from the routine that had
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settled around me. My old computers were cobweb-shrouded, lying idle,
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while I had been reduced to writing boring software for a living and
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arguing with my boss about design methods. Imprisoned, frightened of the
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scope of the next change yet even more frightened of not making it, I
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quit both job and marriage, finding myself a lone homeowner in
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Genericsville, USA… then immediately slipping into debt.
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I dusted off the word processor and began. For three years I wrote a
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book a year and did tech-writing for local industry, filling in the gaps
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with articles about artificial intelligence, robotics, online
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information retrieval, emerging network communities, and
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microprocessors. My textbook, [Creative Design with
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Microcomputers](https://microship.com/industrial-design-with-microcomputers-review)
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(Prentice-Hall), was a complete distillation of the Cybertronics era,
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carrying the exuberant message that “art without engineering is
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dreaming; engineering without art is calculating.”
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Freelance writing was a license to be a generalist, but still… something
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was amiss. I had turned another passion into a business. I was working
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my ass off to pay for a house I didn’t like in a city I didn’t like, and
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every change seemed but a new trap, more insidious than the last. What I
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needed was a lifestyle that would combine all of my passions: computers,
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gizmology, ham radio, bicycling, romance, adventure, steep learning
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curves, the transcendence of the well-turned phrase, interesting people,
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the buzz of publicity, and most of all change — non-stop change —
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weaving through my life as naturally as breath.
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The story begins in March of 1983, in that house on the outskirts of
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Columbus…
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### Related
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