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Computing Across America: The Bicycle Odyssey of a High-Tech Nomad
In his book, Steve Roberts describes the wild results of his drastic break with suburban life. It was a 10,000 mile odyssey.
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First published January 1, 1988
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
November 1, 2022
Steve Roberts is probably the earliest tech-nomad starting about 1984 using Compuserve. Sold his house after a divorce and got a recumbent bike which in time he would deck out with over $1,5M of computer and other hardware, The Winniebiko. He'd ride around the country for over 18,000 miles as a proof of concept of online connectedness.
The first 2/3 of the book reads like: Steve Roberts tries to get a girlfriend, but the last third, he reaches for the West coast, and I sees that he's a part of a bigger phenomena. Almost a decade before the Web. He couch surfed and blogged long before those words/phrases and many other terms which a later generation would think that they invented.
The Biko has been placed in a museum (my recommendation), and Steve has attempted to move on to a human powered amphibious vehicle. From Behemoth to Microship. We stay in touch.
The current best equivalent that I have recently seen on YouTube is without doubt Itchy Boots (from Holland). She is currently finishing up her Project Alaska (in areas that I have driven myself).
The first 2/3 of the book reads like: Steve Roberts tries to get a girlfriend, but the last third, he reaches for the West coast, and I sees that he's a part of a bigger phenomena. Almost a decade before the Web. He couch surfed and blogged long before those words/phrases and many other terms which a later generation would think that they invented.
The Biko has been placed in a museum (my recommendation), and Steve has attempted to move on to a human powered amphibious vehicle. From Behemoth to Microship. We stay in touch.
The current best equivalent that I have recently seen on YouTube is without doubt Itchy Boots (from Holland). She is currently finishing up her Project Alaska (in areas that I have driven myself).
February 26, 2024
It’s 1983. Computer professional Steven K. Roberts, tired of the security of being tied to a desk job, in a mid-life crisis over his perceived lack of freedom, experiences firsthand the utility of a recumbent – that is, a bike that rides more like a chair with a low center-of-gravity. He becomes enraptured with the idea of biking the United States on a bespoke machine, fully packed for camping, distributing the power for hills while allowing its pilot an unencumbered view of the world without craning the neck from the bent-back pose of a traditional 10-speed. In his adult pursuit to combine freedom with security, Roberts plans fastidiously, myopically. He gets a maker to build the bike, an accountant to track his expenses, an agent to sell his home and belongings, and then throws caution to the wind, ala Toady of Wind in the Willows, but with the dimension of paying for the scheme by writing of his travels. He thus creates Computing Across America, a travelogue, using a laptop to document the journey long before blogs or even the mainstream Internet. The finished product is reminiscent of other road journals, like Ed Buryn’s Vagabonding in Europe and North Africa, or Eric Sloane’s Return to Taos, but with a touch of naughtiness, as Roberts’s sexual drive shows up in high gear. While not explicit or raunchy, this side of the writer can make for uncomfortable passages, a foreshadowing of a hedonist jaunt. Fear not, as Roberts’s tastes are choosy and epicurean, the foreshadowing is not of a descent into orgy, but of a rise in consciousness.
Where his love exploits might turn off the more erudite reader, they correspondingly turn on the more plebeian. Some of these interim lovers cotton on to his self-centeredness and give him a much-deserved shellacking. Keep reading. The journey turns philosophic, his writing at times plaintive, at others, soaring, such as when he’s playing a flute to an echoic rock formation in Utah. When plaintive, he makes you aware of the high-adrenaline fear of going it alone through hazardous areas that others have warned him to carry a gun for, which then turn out to be not so bad, fun even, fodder for the book. His melancholy tales of pedaling to happy destiny include the anti-theft system on his bike activating his beeper in the night. He leaps from his tent with knife and pepper spray ready to find it’s a buffeting storm that activates the cycle’s sensors. And he is astutely aware of road rage. On a Florida Everglades shoulder, a passenger half extended from the vehicle’s window unbelievably swings a red electric guitar at him. In Texas, an old drunk cowboy darkly hounds him reminiscent of the suspense from Spielberg’s Duel. In Colorado, he befriends lovely ladies who join his cycling and race ahead. He mounts a hill when, to his horror, he encounters their crash scene: bikes mangled, painful exclamations from the pavement, an old driver clueless as to the damage he caused. I believe it is here that Roberts begins to count the cost of his immaturity.
If that understanding starts halfway in, both writer and reader wonder what it’s all about, this odyssey, as snippets of wisdom belie his true motive. What’s he doing this for? The reader hopes the writer begins to see the approach of dawn on this Homeric expedition, and it arrives in the form of the Continental Divide, the Rockies. Perhaps it’s the shimmering of aspens or the grand expanse of mountains as he rests in Crested Butte and then Telluride. He exhilarates in the uphill climbs, the maniacal, brakeless hairpin turns as he lets gravity accelerate his rig to the valley. This guy has a death wish, we think.
And it’s not over. Across bone-dry, frigid Utah desert, he slogs a low grade toward a mythical downhill slide into California. Mortality again blankets its shade across his path. In an exhausting stretch evocative of Diana Nyad swimming the ocean, he makes it, but not before his first ‘incident’ on the whole Interstate tour when groupies, slowing down in their car, take his attention away on a hazardous section, to say how impressed they are. It’s dark. He doesn’t see the coil of tire tread until too late, and careens off the road to crash amid cactus.
Like Wiley Coyote popping back up after an Acme bomb blast, he says, “I’m OK!”
Now in the Golden State, Roberts claims an inglorious victory in shifty, rundown lodging, typing up the draft for the publisher. It’s not the end, not by far. He’s made it to the Pacific, but he’s already advancing to the next phase is his nomadic career, his ‘nomadness’ that would develop, eventually, into Nomadic Research Labs. What does the future hold, he opines in the Epilogue, writing from a desk after another stint on a ‘real’ job? He and his female companion dream of equipping various means of transport for the long haul, from bikes to boats to light aircraft.
It needs mention that I heard of Roberts in 1984 when he was on his second recumbent bike trip. I worked part-time in my brother's shop at Universal Data Research, down the road from Ingram Micro in Amherst, NY. Smitten with all things tech, I slavered over the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 portable computer Steven used. Though I owned a non-portable Radio Shack Color Computer, I shared his mindset of living in a modem-connected world. I have written to Roberts, now 71, as he looks back on the ‘mistake’ of living in the San Juan Islands of Washington State. He built several boats, called “Microships” that run on solar power and is still a technomad with gadgets up the yin-yang. He now runs a film and video digitizing business, taking gentle care to bring to life exquisite images from black and white negatives from other’s distant pasts. You can hear the call of adventure in his e-mails, his concocting mad schemes of travel. As a vicarious reader of adventures, I appreciate and cheer on his technomadness.
Where his love exploits might turn off the more erudite reader, they correspondingly turn on the more plebeian. Some of these interim lovers cotton on to his self-centeredness and give him a much-deserved shellacking. Keep reading. The journey turns philosophic, his writing at times plaintive, at others, soaring, such as when he’s playing a flute to an echoic rock formation in Utah. When plaintive, he makes you aware of the high-adrenaline fear of going it alone through hazardous areas that others have warned him to carry a gun for, which then turn out to be not so bad, fun even, fodder for the book. His melancholy tales of pedaling to happy destiny include the anti-theft system on his bike activating his beeper in the night. He leaps from his tent with knife and pepper spray ready to find it’s a buffeting storm that activates the cycle’s sensors. And he is astutely aware of road rage. On a Florida Everglades shoulder, a passenger half extended from the vehicle’s window unbelievably swings a red electric guitar at him. In Texas, an old drunk cowboy darkly hounds him reminiscent of the suspense from Spielberg’s Duel. In Colorado, he befriends lovely ladies who join his cycling and race ahead. He mounts a hill when, to his horror, he encounters their crash scene: bikes mangled, painful exclamations from the pavement, an old driver clueless as to the damage he caused. I believe it is here that Roberts begins to count the cost of his immaturity.
If that understanding starts halfway in, both writer and reader wonder what it’s all about, this odyssey, as snippets of wisdom belie his true motive. What’s he doing this for? The reader hopes the writer begins to see the approach of dawn on this Homeric expedition, and it arrives in the form of the Continental Divide, the Rockies. Perhaps it’s the shimmering of aspens or the grand expanse of mountains as he rests in Crested Butte and then Telluride. He exhilarates in the uphill climbs, the maniacal, brakeless hairpin turns as he lets gravity accelerate his rig to the valley. This guy has a death wish, we think.
And it’s not over. Across bone-dry, frigid Utah desert, he slogs a low grade toward a mythical downhill slide into California. Mortality again blankets its shade across his path. In an exhausting stretch evocative of Diana Nyad swimming the ocean, he makes it, but not before his first ‘incident’ on the whole Interstate tour when groupies, slowing down in their car, take his attention away on a hazardous section, to say how impressed they are. It’s dark. He doesn’t see the coil of tire tread until too late, and careens off the road to crash amid cactus.
Like Wiley Coyote popping back up after an Acme bomb blast, he says, “I’m OK!”
Now in the Golden State, Roberts claims an inglorious victory in shifty, rundown lodging, typing up the draft for the publisher. It’s not the end, not by far. He’s made it to the Pacific, but he’s already advancing to the next phase is his nomadic career, his ‘nomadness’ that would develop, eventually, into Nomadic Research Labs. What does the future hold, he opines in the Epilogue, writing from a desk after another stint on a ‘real’ job? He and his female companion dream of equipping various means of transport for the long haul, from bikes to boats to light aircraft.
It needs mention that I heard of Roberts in 1984 when he was on his second recumbent bike trip. I worked part-time in my brother's shop at Universal Data Research, down the road from Ingram Micro in Amherst, NY. Smitten with all things tech, I slavered over the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 portable computer Steven used. Though I owned a non-portable Radio Shack Color Computer, I shared his mindset of living in a modem-connected world. I have written to Roberts, now 71, as he looks back on the ‘mistake’ of living in the San Juan Islands of Washington State. He built several boats, called “Microships” that run on solar power and is still a technomad with gadgets up the yin-yang. He now runs a film and video digitizing business, taking gentle care to bring to life exquisite images from black and white negatives from other’s distant pasts. You can hear the call of adventure in his e-mails, his concocting mad schemes of travel. As a vicarious reader of adventures, I appreciate and cheer on his technomadness.
November 13, 2023
Whilst I did really enjoy the travelogue aspect of this book and the significant curiosity factor given it is a very early example of digital nomadism, the narrative felt overshadowed by vignettes of Steve’s strange and complex personal life as well as a near constant objectification of women, who were mentioned in the book almost exclusively in the context of potential sexual encounters. The book also took a really long time to find its flow; the narrative feeling considerably more engaging in the second half. Whilst I don’t regret reading this book for the reasons mentioned at the start of this review the crass and flippant attitudes throughout this book did dampen my experience of reading it.
never-finished
November 12, 2024I've always seen the photos of Steven Roberts around and thought there was a cool story behind it, surely. Once I've discovered that there were a proto-blog that covered his travels that were later compiled into the book I knew I had to read it. Alas it falls short. I can recognize technical progress, but ultimately it a bit tedious. The images still capture my imagination, but perhaps it is symbolic of the idea that sometimes story inside your head might be more interesting to what actually happened.
March 1, 2017
Bicycle-based trip of a guy kitted out in the technology of the day. If you like adventure road trips, this is a good one with a nerd twist.
I think the bike and his computer is (was?) on display at the Computer History Musuem in Mountain View, CA.
I think the bike and his computer is (was?) on display at the Computer History Musuem in Mountain View, CA.
February 10, 2020
Computing Across America is a book about a silicon valley engineer in the 80s who sells up and makes a journey across the United States on a recumbent bike, plugging the first ever production laptop into payphones along the way to dial in his reportage from on the road.
Roberts wasn’t in the first flush of youth when he made his defining journey, that’s part of the appeal I think. That plenty of people seem to have made a life-defining journey at the pivotal time of their life, age 18-22 and it sets the course for what they do subsequently. Like Henry Shires who invented the tarptent, or the female architect who circumvented the globe by motorbike- Elspeth Beard. It remains something they lean on and which defines them for life. Steve Roberts’ story is that he made his defining journey after a divorce, he started again, and now lives as a permanent nomad on a boat, the continuation of a process that started with that journey. This is an important book for me, and it is difficult to be objective about its quality. The stories of sexual adventure don’t always ring true, but they add a depth of purpose to this book by explaining the yearning, seeking behaviour of the author. The road is only a metaphor for all those who seek, growth is achieved by what you do on the road, it is a microcosm of life, a practice with consequences until the small death of journey’s end allows you to reflect and the luxury of learning from your mistakes knowing that you have yet time to try again.
I pulled courage from this book to uproot myself, change, grow. The author has no agenda to convince you, he just tells you what he did and thought and felt, and there’s enough sincerity there to get an insight into what that process would be like, I found it convincing. You won’t get that from a cynical blog entry, it is increasingly hard to find unfiltered generosity of spirit on the internet and so it seems to me that books have had their role tested and proved by the passing age of blogging. You read a book for depth and to establish a personal relationship with that content and with the author, and you draw your own meanings from it.
Roberts wasn’t in the first flush of youth when he made his defining journey, that’s part of the appeal I think. That plenty of people seem to have made a life-defining journey at the pivotal time of their life, age 18-22 and it sets the course for what they do subsequently. Like Henry Shires who invented the tarptent, or the female architect who circumvented the globe by motorbike- Elspeth Beard. It remains something they lean on and which defines them for life. Steve Roberts’ story is that he made his defining journey after a divorce, he started again, and now lives as a permanent nomad on a boat, the continuation of a process that started with that journey. This is an important book for me, and it is difficult to be objective about its quality. The stories of sexual adventure don’t always ring true, but they add a depth of purpose to this book by explaining the yearning, seeking behaviour of the author. The road is only a metaphor for all those who seek, growth is achieved by what you do on the road, it is a microcosm of life, a practice with consequences until the small death of journey’s end allows you to reflect and the luxury of learning from your mistakes knowing that you have yet time to try again.
I pulled courage from this book to uproot myself, change, grow. The author has no agenda to convince you, he just tells you what he did and thought and felt, and there’s enough sincerity there to get an insight into what that process would be like, I found it convincing. You won’t get that from a cynical blog entry, it is increasingly hard to find unfiltered generosity of spirit on the internet and so it seems to me that books have had their role tested and proved by the passing age of blogging. You read a book for depth and to establish a personal relationship with that content and with the author, and you draw your own meanings from it.
May 15, 2007
Another nerdy story about some goofball who has a crazy idea about how to see the country, right? Wrong...the author does an amazing job of drawing the reader in, and holding their attention througout this magnificent adventure and keeps you entertained with stories of hilarious hostel stays, and more than his fair share of sexy encounters with college co-eds. The book is ultimately one of life's little journey's, and reminds us to enjoy it while it lasts.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews