ComputingAcrossAmericaBook
Introduction/Definition/etc
Interesting bike touring book, with plenty of gadgets, and electronics,
though from the later part of the 1980's...
Body
Computing Across America by Stephen K. Roberts aka WORDY
Computing Across America by Stephen K. Roberts,
now of MicroShip.com fame... 20k miles around
America on a bike, built a recumbent, for a 6'3"
(or 6'4"?) guy in the 1980's as CompuServe was starting
up... He started with a 5 Watt solar panel, TRS-80
Tandy Radio Shack (we called it TRaSh 80)
Model 100? but he likes the modem,
(with acoustic coupler) and get on the net
(not the net we think of now, an online service,
the first and biggest, AFAICT
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe
based in Ohio, an offshoot of an insurance company
selling time on PDP-10 mid range computer
(Some thought it was a mainfraime,
Personal Data Processor was named so that
it went through federal purchasing,
All "Computers" were by definition only IBM)
well before WWW (World Wide Web)
web browsing, but not before
the military underpinnings of the ARPANET
and known today as the Internet)
at any POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service)
and probably an 800 number or local access number,
given free online time, but still had many expenses...
Anyways, he dumps his suburbia life in Dublin, OH
and goes on the road, with this bike
Winnebiko, later BEHEMOTH
(Big Electronic Human-Energized Machine
Only Too Heavy) ,
and, well, lives the non profit life he creates
Nomadic Research Labs
designing, building electronics and writing
to support the $100/ lb, 500 lb contraption,
that becomes his mobile home.
Originally, he thought 100 lbs of stuff,
became ~300 lbs of stuff, later ~500 lbs of stuff,
and had a trailer...
And I'm learning consuming ~5000 calories/ day of fuel...
A typical diet is 2200 calories for a rather sedentary
person...
Cost of food vs cost of gas...
It was a lot less/ gallon in the 1980s...
4-5x the $1/ gallon then?
His Swedish "firebomb" camp stove takes fuel...
Sponsors and donors? Media campaign
and, well, he wants his cake and eat it too,
he says to the girl friend Elisse on the water bed,
later ending up crying as leaving his comfortable
life...
He's living better now, I guess, decades later,
in a 44 foot steel hulled boat, with an electronics
lab in the middle... Doesn't handle like a small
sea kayak Microship.com
Big Boat named NoMadNess...
Book Data
Computing Across America: The Bicycle Odyssey of a High-Tech Nomad
by Stephen K. Roberts
347 pages,
plus ~4 pages of Sponsors and Thank Yous in Acknowledgements
48 Chapters, not all states, lower 48...
No Index :-(
ISBN 0-938734-18-0
c 1988
Learned Information, Inc. Medford, N.J.
Conclusion
Summary of experience or similar
Discussion
A place for feedback on the page presented
Page History
20110804 Jerry
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