EPISODE 17
Adventures of a High-Tech Nomad
Steve Roberts is probably the world’s first high-tech nomad. For roughly a decade (1983 – 1993), Steve was either designing, building, or riding a custom computerized recumbent bicycle. Beginning with the Winnebiko, continuing with the Winnebiko II, and culminating with the 580-pound BEHEMOTH, Steve logged 17,000 miles, all the while writing articles for various publications and transmitting them from his current location. In a time before the internet and smartphones, Steve was one of the first people on the planet to be continuously networked and connected via various technologies, working and socializing, quite literally, on the road. He immediately drew attention from locals in every town, and made friends on CompuServe and other networks. As his exploits became publicized, he appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and was a guest on The Phil Donahue Show in 1992. All these years later, Steve looks back on his amazing journey and his pioneering work on technologies that have become mainstream today
Episode Transcript
BEHEMOTH: Hello. My name is BEHEMOTH. Please do not touch me. Ain’t technology wonderful?
Gabriel: You just heard the synthesized voice of BEHEMOTH, a mind-blowing bicycle and trailer built by Steven K. Roberts between 1989 and 1991 in a Silicon Valley lab, with the support of a team of volunteers and corporate sponsors. For Steve, the BEHEMOTH was the culmination of a decade of designing and traveling on recumbent computerized bicycles. In a time before the internet and smartphones, Steve was one of the first people on the planet to be continuously networked and connected via various technologies, working and socializing quite literally on the road. In this episode of the Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast, we will spend an hour with this self-proclaimed high-tech nomad, listening to a few of his countless adventures.
Sandra: You’re listening to the Accidental Bicycle Tourist. In this podcast, you’ll meet people from all walks of life and learn about their most memorable bike-touring experiences. This is your host, Gabriel Aldaz.
Gabriel: Hello cycle-touring enthusiasts! Welcome to another episode of the Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast. Today’s guest, Steve Roberts, has been the subject of numerous magazine and newspaper articles, including a front-page feature on the Wall Street Journal. He’s appeared on TV, most notably on the Phil Donahue Show, and given talks across the United States. These days, Steve keeps busy with his media digitizing business. Two of his computerized bicycles from the 1980s have been disassembled, but the third one, the BEHEMOTH, I got to see years ago in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Walking through the exhibits full of printed circuit boards and microprocessors and early computing machines, I made a surprising discovery. A bicycle and trailer from 1991 stuffed with electronics, knobs, antennas, and displays called the BEHEMOTH. The word “behemoth” means something of monstrous size, power, or appearance. According to the museum, the BEHEMOTH was the last and heaviest of three bicycles built by brilliant self-taught engineer Steve Roberts. BEHEMOTH weighs 580 pounds loaded, integrating three laptops and several wireless communication systems. Handlebar keys and a helmet-mounted display enable typing while riding. “Wow,” I thought to myself, “Now that’s a rig.” As someone who is passionate about both engineering and bicycle touring, I am thrilled to get to talk today to the man behind the BEHEMOTH. Steve Roberts, thank you so much for being a guest on the Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast.
Steve: Thanks Gabriel, it’s great to be here.
Gabriel: The BEHEMOTH, it seems, is the culmination of years of designing, building, and riding computerized bicycles that allowed you to write articles and even electronically send them while on the road. How did this all begin?
Steve: Well, I lived in Ohio and Ohio inspires long-distance travel and here I am. Actually, I was doing the American Dream. I had a house in suburbia near Columbus and all the accoutrements of that. You know, I’m sitting in the middle of this house in suburbia on an acre and I had to mow and pay insurance and just all this stuff and it just was driving me nuts. And it hit me one day that I’m doing things that I’m not enjoying very much anymore to pay for things I definitely don’t want. This is crazy.
Gabriel: What kind of work were you doing?
Steve: I was freelance writing and designing computers and consulting and stuff and doing them as a business. Even my writing, which I’d always thought of as this passionate, personal thing, I was doing consulting writing for clients as well as magazine work. I’d just written a textbook and things like that.
Gabriel: What kind of textbook?
Steve: It’s called Industrial Design with Microcomputers and it’s a book aimed at senior and graduate level students about designing industrial control systems with microprocessors. This was back circa 1980, I think I wrote that. Actually, I’m just trying to scan it now with my textbook scanner to get it onto my server because I need a hobby. That was the origin of my signature quote that I’ve had all these years. “Art without engineering is dreaming. Engineering without art is calculating.”
Gabriel: Very good.
Steve: So, I’m doing something I don’t like to pay for something I don’t want. How do we fix that? It sounds so retro philosophical, but the first inkling I got of this idea was to just make a list of all my passions and combine them into a lifestyle and magically find a way to combine travel and adventure and bicycling and computing and romance and publishing and meeting interesting people and gizmology and computers and ham radio and all that stuff and put it all together into something that I could do as a living, as a lifestyle. And that sort of thing didn’t really exist then, and I had just had the experience of seeing somebody on a recumbent bicycle, which put this sort of vision in my head, because I knew on a regular bike I would just hurt myself and my hands would hurt, my butt and my neck would hurt. Anyway, I just didn’t want to do that. It felt like it would be hard, but with the recumbent, all of a sudden click, click, click.
Gabriel: So then when you decided that suburbia was not for you, you were able to combine everything together in this really unique way, which was that you already had a lot of technical knowledge to put together this very unique bicycle.
Steve: Just to be clear, I didn’t design the recumbent. I saw somebody on an Avatar. In fact, it was serial number 1. It was this old man, younger than I am now, riding out in the country in Ohio, and he let me ride it, which was amazing, and I absolutely fell in love with this thing. I’m sitting back comfortable. I’ve got a good view of the road ahead, hands resting at my side… That’s it, I want to do that. I started designing one, and with a friend of mine built this thing called the Junker, and we basically learned that bike building is kind of an art form, and that if I was going to build a whole lifestyle around this thing and carry equipment, I should probably find a professional to do it. So there was this frame builder in Columbus named Jack Trumbull, and he had a business called Franklin Frames, and he was really known for his tandems, really beautiful stuff. With his skills in that department and my weird needs, this bike was born. Commercial recumbents that existed then were very few. The Avatar and the Tour Easy, I think, with the latter being high handlebar, if I remember.
Gabriel: Yes, the Tour Easy had a high handlebar, yeah.
Steve: But none of them were really robust enough for what I wanted. I didn’t like the steering geometry, or they were just too fragile for what I expected to be many years of travel. And so the nice thing about having the tandem routes in this thing is that there’s a crossover drive, so the pedals up forward have just a one-to-one chain going back to a chainring under the seat, and then that’s a crossover to the other side, where you have a normal wide-ranged derailleur. And the beauty of that is that you can then have an eccentric up forward and keep the chain tensioned as it stretches and things like that, and have normal gearing without that big floppy chain that is just maddening on some recumbents, all the way from the pedals to the rear wheel. They’re terrible. And so there was that, and then also we used triple stays in the back, so instead of just the usual two back to the rear axle, there were three, so really strong. And 48-spoke undished wheel, and by being undished, we had such a strong structure compared to the normal bike wheel that was dished on one side, but flat on the other. Undished being symmetrical, and in all those years, I never broke a spoke, which is kind of amazing.
Gabriel: That’s astonishing, really.
Steve: You know, we put a lot of work into just coming up with good human interface. Half-inch of positive trail, so the underseat steering was really well behaved, and no wobble at speed. It was a good truck to start with. And we didn’t go for being ultra light, but it was still 4130 chromoly and done by somebody who actually knew what he was doing, which is where Jack came in. Probably I got further on that trip than I would have if I had picked a commercial one.
Gabriel: Yeah, it sounds like it’s a robust frame for sure.
Steve: We should have marketed them, but then I would be a bike builder and grumpy, so…
Gabriel: Yeah, I’m not sure about the market size either.
Steve: No, that’s true. At the same time, CompuServe was just down the street, so there was this brand new thing happening with, you know, a central computer network that was forming this culture, and portable computers were just starting to happen with the Radio Shack Model 100, and the implications were obvious.
Gabriel: For those listeners who may not have been around for it, can you tell what CompuServe is?
Steve: Yeah, long before the internet, there were a small number of individual companies that offered network services, and so you would sign up to one of them, or after a while multiple ones, because you would have friends on a different one and wanted to be able to do this new electronic mail with them. But basically, you would call a local number if you were in a city and have a text-based CompuServe was really the first big one, and it became this huge central component of my lifestyle because it made physical location irrelevant. When I started thinking about staying connected while moving and by staying connected, I mean being in touch with a base office and talking with publishers and doing things for clients and all this stuff, I obviously had to have something other than long distance phone calls. So being able to have a network connection, even what we now know is really primitively, was an essential component.
Gabriel: That did enable you to be on the road. And then, the basic setup that you needed, how did that come about? It seems like your first bicycle, which as you mentioned was always going to be a recumbent, was the whimsically-named Winnebiko. So how did you put the Winnebiko together?
Steve: The name Winnebiko didn’t come along for a little while. I was in a campground down in Texas, and a guy pulled in next to me and unloaded a lawnmower and started mowing the grass around his campsite, and I think that’s when I first realized it was a meeting of alien cultures. He was from Houston, he says, “Well, I just like to come up here to God’s country and get away from it all,” and I just thought that was so funny, because I had done 5,000 miles on this bicycle and was camping in a little dome tent, and he was in the next campsite mowing the grass, and I thought, this is awesome.
Gabriel: And let me guess, the brand of motorhome that he had was Winnebago.
Steve: Yes. I saw that he had a Winnebago, and somehow I think that the wordplay occurred to me then, if I remember correctly. The name stuck. You know, it wasn’t really the branding I would have chosen deliberately for this thing. It was the bike, it was computing across America, I didn’t really name it for a while.
Gabriel: Tell me about the electronics that then you outfitted this first Winnebiko.
Steve: That first one was really simple. Integrated systems were really a small part of it. I had the little Model 100 laptop in the back, which people went nuts over that. Nobody even seen one of those. There was a 5-watt solar panel on a ball-and-socket contraption up near the front of the bike to charge a 4 amp-hour NICAD battery, and that was my power source for basically everything. And a simple security system with a pager, motion sensor, you know, and stuff like that. And let’s see… oh God, there was a CB. It was culturally useless, but nice to have this extra communications pipe. And a lighting system. There was a 7-inch barricade flasher, one of those yellow flashers from the side of the road behind the seat, and then a tail light and a headlight. And I soon put a headlight on my helmet too for various reasons. But that’s it. Nothing really fancy. Oh, and a little electronic speed/distance/cadence thing. Back then, gosh, the only one I could find was this thing called the Push, and it was just horrible. And then finally the Cateye came out and I switched to that like a year later. Anyway, the first version of the bike was not a lot of electronics.
Gabriel: So the brains of it was the Model 100. So that’s the old Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100?
Steve: Yep, it was actually built by Kyocera and the beautiful little 4 pound computer, a 300 baud modem, and a 32K memory that you could work in. That was my whole workspace for writing articles and everything.
Gabriel: And to clarify, a baud is a bit per second, so comparing 300 bits per second to today’s high-speed internet of maybe 100 Mbit/s or 100 million bits per second, you get an idea of the many orders of magnitude difference and transmission rate.
Steve: And 32K.
Gabriel: Yeah, again, instead of 32,000 bytes of memory, a laptop today could easily have 16 gigabytes of memory. So, just insane.
Steve: It’s insane. Let’s see. Oh yeah, and the screen was eight lines of 32 characters, I believe. So I wrote countless magazine articles on this thing and I would have to get rid of something in order to write something else. And I used CompuServe for that. I had a file storage area there. So all right, I’m going to get rid of the Byte magazine article now and do my monthly column for Online Today.
Gabriel: If I picture this man on a recumbent with solar panels and a computer and flashing lights, you must have drawn a lot of attention from people across the country. How did people on the street react when they saw you?
Steve: That was one of the best parts. Gosh, comments on the road were just marvelous. I had a little pocket cassette recorder and I tried to use it for dictating stories, but I was never very good at it. But it was great for listening to music and stuff. But what was really fun would be if I parked the bike somewhere and go in to have lunch, I would leave the recorder going, recording, so that when I was then riding down the road afterwards, I could listen to the comments people made. Because if I recorded while I was there, it was just me answering the same questions and my usual sound bites. It was awesome to hear people talk about it and speculate. And one guy in Texas said, “Damn, that dude could survive a nuclear war.” So anyway, people on the road would see this thing and there’s a recumbent bicycle (bizarre), solar panels (were not common then), and then some guy with a computer and a pay phone, which is completely insane.
Gabriel: There’s so many things about this that are hard to imagine and maybe younger listeners will still have no idea about what it looks like. When you talk about a modem with this really low baud rate, you have to find a pay phone somewhere out there and make a call. So you’re kind of tethered to this pay phone sitting in some really random place at times.
Steve: One step later than having to turn the crank, you know.
Gabriel: Exactly.
Steve: That was the way to connect back then. And of course it required an acoustic coupler, which are these two little rubber cups that would snap onto the receiver and the mouthpiece. And then the computer would connect those as the modem sounds and go from there. It was such a huge part of life back then. If we tried to do that now, I mean, God, I’d send you an image and, you know, a week later you’ve got it. Everything was just text, you know, even user interfaces and the things you logged into. Any logo was made out of ASCII characters, not pictures. And there was no sound, no multimedia, of course. So oddly slow communication like that, especially 1200 and 300 was painful even then, but 1200 really just became the lingua franca for a long time. And it was plenty. You know, it can’t read much faster when you’re looking at a little screen in the sunlight. So it’s amazing how well we we managed with that.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Steve: The morning of the first full day, I had had the launch from CompuServe parking lot in Columbus, and I was camping out in Christiansburg, Ohio, the small town in Western Ohio, and I came into town from the place where I camped, which was just miserable and really badly done. I had no idea what I was doing yet. And I was hunkered down with a pay phone to upload the first night story, you know, to my secretary back in Ohio who was anxiously waiting to hear if I was still alive. So I’m sitting there on the pavement with this Model 100, you know, and the bike sitting there in the sun next to me and this pickup truck pulled alongside and this guy got out and he’s chewing tobacco and he’s got a caterpillar tractor hat and he’s heading over to the M&M Cafe, and he saw me and he stopped and he walked over and looked the bike over and reached down and touched the chain and stuff and nodded here and there. And finally he spat tobacco juice and said, “Are you with NASA?” And of course I said, “Why yes, sir. This here is a looney excursion module.”
Gabriel: Awesome.
Steve: That set the tone for the whole trip.
Gabriel: Yeah, I can imagine.
Steve: I called myself the high-tech nomad. I coined that initially back in ’83. And then the other terminology that came right from the beginning back in ’83, a woman named Carole Gerber rolled an article about me in Online Today‘s magazine, part of CompuServe, called “Steve Roberts: Computing Across America.” That’s what led to the book title and my name for the adventure for a while back there. I don’t know if I’m going to use that now. It’s not a very exciting turn of phrase, you know. I’ll probably be calling the book High-Tech Nomad.
Gabriel: And here you’re talking about your planned re-release of Computing Across America in digital format.
Steve: Right. So it ended up having an effect that I didn’t really anticipate, which was that I became this kind of agent of future shock, and people would call their local media. You know, I’d have TV crews waiting for me when I pulled into town because somebody called and let them know there was this crazy bike, and… You know, so it had this interesting effect of opening a lot of doors that way and giving me a voice, which I really didn’t expect except as a writer. So that was pretty fun. And then eventually, you know, that started leading to sponsors. And I started finding it easier to get pieces of equipment for later versions. And, you know, that all became this symbiosis as a result of looking weird.
Gabriel: You definitely made a splash on your first ride with the Winnebiko. And then with the media attention and maybe some of the sponsorship and so forth, you started dreaming up of a second bike, the aptly-named Winnebiko II.
Steve: I hadn’t really planned on that. So when I got to California, I landed in San Clemente. I had a book contract by then to write Computing Across America. So I spent many, many months doing that, and that’s a long story. But anyway, I then rode up the coast, which was gorgeous, and was in Silicon Valley for a while and hanging out with friends. And, you know, just I had arrived, you know, I’m with all my uber-geeks and just having a wonderful time. There was some logic to my having to go back to Ohio. And I forget what the motive was, but I think I still had stuff there. My base office was there. Something caused that. And then I was sort of slowly running out of money. And I thought, “OK, fine, I’ll crank up the freelancing business again.” And I was doing that. And one of my subjects got excited about all the stuff I had done. And he hired me on the spot. I went, “OK, fine, I’ll be an employee.” So for a few months, I was actually an employee in Ohio after that first trip. And I wasn’t cut out for it. I’m a terrible employee. And, you know, I don’t like getting up that early. And there’s lots of reasons. I’m supposed to be writing code for interactive video disc stuff, and I’m drawing pictures of recumbent bicycles and these interesting user interface concepts. And I thought, “You know, screw it, I’m going to do another trip.” And I quit that day and they just couldn’t believe it because it was a new company and nobody had ever quit.
Gabriel: Well, they probably remembered you: “Worst hire we ever made!”
Steve: Right. It was terrible. He was awful. Then I spent about the next six months building the Winnebiko II. The console was wonderful. And the biggest, huge thing on it in terms of like actual useful innovations goes back to a day in West Texas on the first trip. And I was riding along and a story, I forget what, was writing itself in my head. And I was thinking, God, this is horrible. I’m not going to remember this. And by the time I’m somewhere tonight, I’m not going to sit down and write and it’s gone. It’s just off in the breeze, you know, as it writes itself in my head. I wish I could write while riding. And I had tried the dictation, which never was very good for me. And I thought, well, heck, you know, this is stupid. I play a flute. I use nine fingers to play the flute. And that gives me three octaves. There’s only 26 letters and, you know, let’s just write in ASCII. So I started designing this handlebar keyboard. I didn’t stop and design the system on the bike while I was cross-country. But when I was starting on the Winnebiko II, that was a key component in the whole thing. So I built a keyboard in the handlebars, four buttons on each side, and there was no fancy coding. Three strong fingers on the right hand and two on the left was the low five bits of the ASCII character. And then that went through a little bicycle control processor, a 68HC11, so I could generate text that then pretended to be the keyboard of a Model 100, which was by now built into the console. So that meant that I could ride the bike and write articles just by squeezing these character combinations, which of course was also clumsily slow because it’s not like regular typing. So I put in a system that let me create a macro library. So things like “TYVM” would automatically become “thank you very much” and stuff like that. So I got pretty quick at it after a few months. And there was a lot of other stuff in that version, but that was one of the really key design goals.
Gabriel: Here we should say that ASCII, A-S-C-I-I, is an acronym for something, but the important part is that it’s a representation of the letters of the alphabet, the numbers, and some special characters. So by inputting a combination of zeros and ones, you can represent the letter A, for example.
Steve: Yes. Upper and lower case, all the numbers, special characters, periods, all that stuff, those all became really intuitive. And then I had a little code chart in my map case, if I for some reason needed to do something weird, like percents or something.
Gabriel: But then you had to remember hundreds of characters.
Steve: It wasn’t painful at all. The learning curve was easy, but the downside was that really, really common letters, like the most common ones, E-T-A-O-I-N-S-H-R-D-L-U, in that order, those were not necessarily the easiest finger combinations. And so it was hobbled by being a little clumsy that way, but the upside was that it was easy to learn and I just got used to it. So now I could write and do packet data communications, which is like primitive texting, and we can make notes to myself, chats with somebody by the side of the road and write down their phone number, all while just sitting there with my hands on the handlebars.
Gabriel: So I’m trying to picture you basically, you have your hands on the handlebars, and then you’re doing some flute-like squeezing motions and sending it. And then in front of you, being a recumbent, it’s common to have this kind of windshield. And then in that space, you have a display and knobs.
Steve: I believe I’m the first person to have the distinction of texting while writing one day in Silicon Valley.
Gabriel: A dubious honor.
Steve: Not sure that’s a good claim to fame, but there it is.
Gabriel: Yeah. Yeah, so that’s pretty cool.
Steve: And I wouldn’t really use it to do detail editing and stuff, because I didn’t want to be squinting at the screen, trying to pay attention to the cursor and all that stuff. But for just text capture, it was great. And the nice thing is having things like the packet radio and things like that, I suddenly started having communications while mobile. And it’s so hard to express just how incredible this was back then, because suddenly not only could I be anywhere and still be connected, now I could actually be moving and still be connected. And we take that so much for granted now. I mean, this phone I’m holding in my hand, I just would have considered better than the best science fiction. Back then, being able to have your physical location literally not matter while you’re interacting with people, instead of being tied to a phone that is wired to the wall, was really, really transformative.
Gabriel: Yeah, and you seem to have developed a network of people through CompuServe that, if you were in their vicinity, they were happy to host you.
Steve: Yeah, I had some of the early touring cyclist resources. There was a guy named Mosley who had a touring cyclist hospitality list that he published every year, I think.
Gabriel: Yeah, that Touring Cyclist Hospitality Directory eventually became Warm Showers.
Steve: And there was BikeCentennial and a few other… Hosteling, of course, you know. But so I had folders in my pack, literally paper file folders with those kind of things. And my little hospitality binder. Now there was this sort of new world of my community. Culturally back then, the net was so unlike now in that if you were online, you had to get through so many learning curves and barriers to just be online. I mean, you had to have a computer, which was a pretty big thing. And then you had to recognize that a modem is where computers actually start to get really interesting. You’re willing to pay a monthly service fee to be on the system. All these filters. So for the most part, people who were online were people, if they invited me to come stay with them, I go, “Great, awesome. What’s your address?” I’m not sure I would do that now as readily. But back then it was like having this global fraternity.
Gabriel: Like you said, CompuServe had developed and had gotten enough of a name that even though it’s a small community by today’s standards, for a touring cyclist, it is a massive resource. With even a subset of people who might be interested in what you’re doing, it’s still a lot of people to look up when you’re in the neighborhood.
Steve: I had over 2,000 invitations by the end of it all. And that’s all the old database contacts and the people who had sent notes. Just basically everybody was in that range. That was such a resource, I could literally play connect the dots while traveling. And then as I’m sure you know from bicycle touring, this other thing starts to happen where you start linking networks together. So you stay with somebody in Richmond, Virginia, or something and they connect you with their friend or their sister who’s in college or whatever. So 500 miles down the road, you call up this other person and say, “Hey, I got to know your brother. What are you doing?” And you just end up with these links, sometimes three or four layers deep, building these little friends circles and stuff. It was certainly the most social period of my life, and network was a lot of it, but not all of it.
Gabriel: You talked about communications. Did you also have a ham radio set up on the Winnebiko II?
Steve: Definitely. The CB was never something I took very seriously. That got me out of trouble a couple of times, like when I was out of water in Utah and stuff like that. It was a lifesaver. But culturally, I really wanted something to build yet another one of those networks. And ham radio long before the networks was that being able to pull into town and get on repeaters and then packet radio had just come out, so I could basically do email and get on little bullet and board type systems and things like that.
Gabriel: Based on your penchant for making funny names, I’m a little worried to ask, but what was your call sign?
Steve: Oh, N4RVE. I never did get a vanity call, and of course I had to do a backronym: Nomad 4 Recumbent Vehicle Escapades or something. But that’s not why I have it. It’s kind of cool because it looks like NERVE, but it was really randomly assigned by the FCC, sadly. I did want N0MAD, but it was taken. And I also like W1RED, which was tempting, but it was also taken.
Gabriel: Ah, okay. So you at least gave it some thought.
Steve: I did, I did.
Steve (tape): “All CQ, all CQ. This is N4RVE November 4 Romeo Victor Echo, bicycle mobile in Kentucky, calling CQ, CQ, CQ, CQ and standing by.”
Steve: The ham radio has always been a big part of it. It’s one of those things I do cyclically in my life, no pun intended. I have a small rig here in my current lab, but I’m not very active really.
Gabriel: Oh, I was going to say you’re still reachable by ham radio.
Steve: Yes, not just like reaching out and pinging me or anything quite like that, but you know, I do weekly nets. And then pretty soon I started carrying HF, and which I’d be camped somewhere and throw a dipole up in the trees. And with Morse code, talk around the world. And so I was just acutely conscious of being connected all the time with all these different pathways. I’ve got HF rigs that really need to get back on the air once I get the antenna up. So many projects!
Gabriel: Very good. Anything else about the Winnebiko II or people that you met on the road with the Winnebiko II?
Steve: Yeah, there was a couple of other things there. First of all, the console had all those capabilities and such, but there was also a lot more going on. There was way more solar panels to it, two 20-watt panels now. But there was also a really big personal difference, and that is that I met a woman named Maggie at a jazz club in Ohio one night while I was working on the bike. We hit it off, and a few days later, I asked if she wanted to go for a bike ride, and she said, “Oh, sure, that sounds fun.” I said, “Great! So sell your car, quit your job, trash your lifestyle, and get a recumbent bicycle, and we’ll leave in August.” And that’s basically what happened. Personally, this was really relevant because on my first trip, one of the things I wrote about freedom and security and all the beginnings when you’re traveling, you know, all that on-the-road romance, which always has these beginnings and endings, and that created a real longing for something that was more substantial and the other end of that spectrum, right? And so the second trip was that, and it was wonderful to have both of those experiences on the road. So she and I did 6,000 miles together on both coasts of the US, and basically went from Seattle down to the Silicon Valley and trucked them back to Ohio to put out fires in Ohio, and then took off from there up through Northeast, in New York and edges New England and down the east coast of Florida. So I was up to 16,000 then, but our trip on the Winnebiko II was 6,000.
Gabriel: And then I guess at some point Maggie decided she wanted to settle down.
Steve: Well, you know how life is. We moved in different directions. I started on the BEHEMOTH project, which turned into just way more than it should have. It was about a three-year project, with Sun Microsystems giving me lab space in Silicon Valley. It was a major lifestyle investment to build this thing, and we just did different things. To nobody’s… nobody’s… Anyway, sorry, no details necessary, but we’re still friends. And then BEHEMOTH, well, that’s jumping to the next chapter. I had to have the ultimate geek extravaganza at that point, because by the time I was done with the Winnebiko II trip on both coasts, I was really aware of all the things I wanted it to do more. That console had all these hardwired switches and LEDs and things, which meant if I wanted to change something, I was editing with a soldering iron, you know, and I started thinking it would be really nice to have everything be software-controlled, and so that launched me down what turned into a really big undertaking, and that’s the one you saw in the museum.
Gabriel: Exactly, and BEHEMOTH is always written in capital letters, so I’m not sure am I supposed to just shout out BEHEMOTH any time I say it?
Steve: Well, it’s also an acronym. By now, I was being more deliberate about the namespace, so it stands for Big Electronic Human-Energized Machine Only Too Heavy.
Gabriel: How heavy was it?
Steve: Well, fully loaded with all of my stuff, with the trailer packed to the rafters, it was right at 580 pounds.
Gabriel: Right, that’s 263 kilos. That’s the weight that was given in the description. Is that how much you had to pedal around?
Steve: Well, I have a profound new respect for gravity. It led to some added technology that was designed to compensate for the weight of all the technology. One of those things was, remember that crossover drive I mentioned? On BEHEMOTH, instead of being a one-to-one crossover chain on the left, there’s a five-speed derailleur on the rear end of that, so single gear up front, five speeds on the left of the back, and then three on the right on the crossover, and then seven on the rear wheel. Five by three by seven matrix, or 105 speeds. The granny gear was 7.9 inches, and the tall gear was 122.
Gabriel: On the podcast, I often say, “When in doubt, get more gears,” but this is absolutely ridiculous.
Steve: Well, some combinations are nonsensical. You know, every bike has nonsense combinations, so mine has even more. The good thing about it is that I could get an impedance match for anything I wanted to do. But anyway, the gearing system was effective. The other great tool for handling all that weight was the pneumatically deployed landing gear. It was two arms that would swing down with a little four-bar linkage with a pneumatic cylinder, and then a couple of little suspension arms with the bungees kind of stolen from the old Piper Cub design. And so I could push a button, and those would swing down and lock, and then I could go infinitely slowly up a hill, which, you know, turned out to be useful. Also good for track stands. After a while, I started understanding the shape of the road that I was on, so not only knowing what ratio exactly I needed right now, but what’s coming next that won’t be a hard shift. And so I would choose one of the paths through that network to fit that. And mostly got good at it, except every now and then I really screwed up. I got stuck on a little tiny, short hill once.
Gabriel: What happened?
Steve: So imagine you get this thing that has super low gears and a disc brake and some other brakes, but the key being the disc screwed onto the rear wheel hub. And then these landing gears. I was going up a hill in Wisconsin, and, you know, it’s not huge mountainous country, but there’s little hills here and there. And this was one of those, and it was super steep, and I kind of got stuck. So the problem was that it was gravel. It had been pavement, I could just crawl up the thing. And I had been doing that, in fact, just as an open parent for a second – I had a heat exchanger in my helmet and a little peristaltic pump behind the seat, and it was really hot, and I could reach back and give that little pump little turns. And there was a seven liter tank of water with crushed ice in it that I kept in an insulated space behind the seat. And it would circulate that ice water through my helmet liners. So it would reduce the body derating from sweating too hard – So I’m doing all this, and I’m going up this hill and giving myself little bits of cold water. And then I got to this gravel section, and I lost traction. I just stopped, and every time I’d push the pedals, the wheel would just spin because it was loose, fresh gravel. And so now I’m literally stuck, and I’m sitting there, and I’ve got the brakes squeezed hard. My knuckles are white, I’m holding them so tight, because I don’t want to go backwards. I can’t go forward. I can’t go back. I can’t go left or right. I’m kind of looking up, hoping for a helicopter. And then all of a sudden, without warning the disc brake from hell just unscrewed from my rear wheel hub. It was a Phil Wood disc, and I hadn’t put it on with Loctite. I didn’t think about having to stop myself from going backwards. All of a sudden, without any warning, I just started careening downhill backwards, and obviously that didn’t last very long. That was probably 10 feet or something because the trailer jackknifed, and I was down.
Gabriel: Oh, no!
Steve: I’m still tied into the clip pedals. I can’t get out of those things, and my left leg was being pinned to the ground by the corner of the console, and this thing’s heavy. And now I’m trapped under my bicycle on this gravel road, and I look up at the console, you know, which is laying on the ground, and there’s this little red LED going, “Okay, okay.” It’s like, what do you know? You know, I was just like, “No, it’s not okay!” So I’m just lying there, trapped under my bicycle, which is a weird turn of phrase. I hear this big motor, and the guy comes by in a motorcycle, and he’s stopping. “Excuse me.” And I say, “Yes?” He goes, “What is that?” And I said, “Well, I’ll tell you what. You get it off of me, and I’ll tell you about it.” So we ended up sharing a campsite and everything, and had a wonderful evening, but it was an uncomfortable moment. You ever go to a bike shop with BEHEMOTH, They just look at you like, “Oh, we wouldn’t have any parts for that.” BEHEMOTH wasn’t entirely practical. It was a lot of fun. It was definitely a technological tour de force, but if I was going to really tour and could magically go back in time, I would probably use the Winnebiko II with a smartphone.
Gabriel: Yeah, it seemed like the Winnebiko II was maybe the optimal combination of mobility, weight, and maybe with upgraded communications, but the BEHEMOTH was…
Steve: It was too hard.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Steve: Oh, it just had some really, really cool technical systems. It was the first mobile, fully qualified IP network node. It could do PPP via cellular over Telebit cell blazers. And I had email via satellite directly to the Qualcomm Omnitrax Hub through the GTE G-Star satellite at 165 bits per second. And my Mac in the console could do a POP and SMTP through this thing. So I would always have email transport happening. And with the Macintosh on the console, in addition to the handlebar keyboard, there was a head mouse. The ultrasonic sensors on my helmet would detect my head movement from a little 40 kilohertz field in the console. And as I moved my head around, it looked like the cursor was just tied to the end of my nose with an invisible stick. And so I could type and use the mouse all while pedaling. And there was a heads-up display in the helmet for another computer that I used for note-taking and things. It was a 720 by 280 thing that floated in space. And a lot more: Motion-sensing security system and GPS, which was brand new tech then. So the security system could, if the worst happened and the bike was being moved without the right password, it could dial 911 on the bike’s cellular phone and use the speech synthesizer to say, “Hello, I’m a bicycle. I’m being stolen. My coordinates are…” And that doesn’t even sound funny now, but back then it was insane.
Gabriel: That’s very cool. Can you tell a little bit about what it took to get this together? It’s an impressive list of technology. You said that you were in Silicon Valley developing it, which seems like absolutely the perfect place to develop something like this.
Steve: So I landed in Santa Cruz on the Winnebiko II. And that’s where the project started. Just really trying to find lab space for a project like this. And then Borland International gave me lab space for a while, which was really fun, up in Scotts Valley. I ended up in a conference, met a couple of the founders of Sun Microsystems. I told them that I always wanted to ride a Unix cycle.
Gabriel: A Unix cycle. That terrible joke is what got the BEHEMOTH off the ground?
Steve: I guess they liked that, so they made me a consultant, and I had a lab in Mountain View and the campus there for about a year and a half, and that’s where the bulk of the BEHEMOTH development took place. And that was the bike lab.
Gabriel: You must have gotten help from a lot of…
Steve: Oh, yeah.
Gabriel: Interested volunteers.
Steve: I really did. That was the best part. It was kind of like conducting an orchestra comprised entirely of virtuosi. I got so many amazing volunteers. I mean, just these brilliant people who were the best at what they did, and all of them were my teachers. I just ended up diving into all these technologies thanks to them. Whether it’s hydraulics or fabrication or circuit board design or Forth software design or whatever. I could make a list as long as my arm. All these really cool people. There were about 45 volunteers who participated in it, and about 148 corporate sponsors, I think I added them all up once. But the important thing there is that none of them gave me money. I didn’t want to make the mistake of having a title sponsor who paid me cash to fly their flag because then nobody would ever believe anything I said ever again. Instead, the way I did it was, “Hey, I really like this gadget you make. Can I have one? And if you give me one, I’ll integrate it into my bike and then I’ll tell you all about it.” And so I ended up being like this off-site, Skunk Works unconstrained by internal politics and doing all this design work with people’s products. And that ended up being, in most cases, a really good relationship. The best part for me is that I just had all these awesome toys. The downside of that, of course, is that I had all these really awesome toys and I, therefore, compelled to build them all into the bike, which is why it got so heavy.
Gabriel: Right.
Steve: Three years of that being an adventure on its own and then the road after that.
Gabriel: You got a ton of publicity with the BEHEMOTH. You were on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. But for me, the high point of the publicity has to be your appearance on The Phil Donahue Show.
Steve: That was fun.
Gabriel: The Phil Donahue Show was a fixture on daytime television in the United States, running from 1967 until 1996. That’s 29 seasons and 6,715 episodes. In each episode, Phil Donahue typically interviewed a guest in front of a studio audience. Phil’s interview with Steve Roberts aired in 1992, and it’s amazing to watch Steve describe technologies that are mainstream today, such as texting and emailing on the go, mobile phones and GPS-assisted navigation. To those 1992 listeners, he must have sounded like an alien. There’s a link to the episode in the show notes. I highly recommend watching if you’re interested in the history of technology. Also, Steve graciously provided me with the B-roll that he recorded for the show. That’s where today’s additional sound clips come from. This is our small way of remembering Phil Donahue, who died earlier this year at the age of 88.
Steve: Some of the questions are marvelous. Were you influenced by Star Trek at all? I guess a good question and actually the answer is yes, so… I think Phil was deliberately letting himself discover this at the same time the audience did, because he had a boat, he knew about GPS and stuff. So he was aware of these technologies, maybe not so much the networking stuff, but he’s only been in a studio environment doing a lot of tech right there. And I noticed as the show went on, he started really rolling with it and talking about how culturally people can be connected while not in a normal social setting and all these things. So he totally got it. I love talking with him. Somehow he did that in a way that was so comfortable that I felt like he was driving, but I was still completely free to be myself. So it was not intimidating like some people can be.
Gabriel: Oh yeah, not intimidating at all. As far as the questions go, I also love how there was some stereotypical guy: “I want to know, are women turned on by this bicycle, like with cars and stuff?”
Steve: And I said, “Yeah, you should get one.”
Gabriel: And then of course, you tried to explain very calmly that, “Hey, I can see, there is a dot that shows me where I am in the United States on this map.” And Phil’s like, “That’s not possible.”
Steve: “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Gabriel: And you said, “No, no, it’s possible. The maps are downloaded on CD-ROM and we can read them.”
Steve: Exactly. I was using something called GeoQuery at the time. And in fact, I had a nickname for it. I had my database tied to it through some really obscure XFCN script in HyperCard, I think it was really clunky. But it would talk to the GeoQuery thing. So if I was someplace, I’m out on the bike, I could bring up the map of where I am and wherever I had a contact in the database, I would see a little triangle. And then I could double-click on that triangle and pop up the database record just text, like five lines of text or something. And I called it my High-Tech Couch Circuit Management System. I could literally call them. I could highlight the phone number field. There was a 3-watt cellular bag phone built into the bike all integrated. And I could call them through the bike’s audio system and say, “Hey, we met at Comdex in 1988. And you said if I was ever near Topeka, I should give you a call. And I’m 12.2 miles away at a bearing of 136 degrees. What’s for dinner?” Good times.
Gabriel: Yeah, that was really good. And you just described everything so calmly and so nicely.
Steve: Oh, thank you.
Gabriel: I just thought it was a great appearance on your part. Yeah, good old Phil, he just couldn’t believe it. One other question about Phil, how was it in advance when you arrived?
Steve: It was fine. I had somebody sort of shepherding me through the process who was their producer. I think he had seen my Wall Street Journal piece or something, and had invited me and they came and did some B-roll. And I was visiting my parents in Kentucky. So that was the videos from there. I actually have some of that raw footage. I recently digitized it. It’s really nice. But the woman who had me under her wing showing me around, we were in a hallway and he kind of brushed by, and he didn’t make eye contact or say anything. And I commented to her, “Oh gosh, he seems very brusque.” And she goes, “Oh, no, he doesn’t want to make any contact with you at all until the audience gets to do it with him. He wants to discover you the same time they do.” And I thought, that’s actually brilliant. So he was meeting me for the first time when we were on. So that was a good lesson there.
Gabriel: Again, it’s also clear that that’s his first exposure to the technology.
Steve: We’ve come to really take for granted all this connectivity and processing power. Every now and then, I just kind of have to stop and marvel at some of the stuff that’s in my lab here. I mean, there’s a rack over a few feet away from me that’s 180 terabytes of NAS, you know, my server. And 180 terabytes, the fact I can even say those words is ridiculous. Obviously, all these things we carry around in our pockets and being able to make video that’s really good. Whereas back on BEHEMOTH to get the phone, I had a 3-watt Oki 491. It was back in the days of the bag phone. You know, those big things. And I separated the handset from the TRU and then built an interface inside that simulated a loop-start phone line that then ran around the bike. So that went out to the modem, the fax, the answering machine – literal answering machine – with little micro cassette tapes.
Steve (tape): “Hello, this is a portable phone aboard BEHEMOTH, the computerized recumbent bicycle of Nomadic Research Labs. I’m not on the bike at the moment, but please leave a message and as soon as I get back, I will find it and call you back. Thank you.”
Steve: And a credit card verifier that allowed me to take orders on the road if somebody wanted to subscribe to the Nomadness Journal. And if they say, “Oh, too bad, I’d love to get it, but I don’t have any cash.” And I’ll say, “Oh, that’s okay, I have plastic.” And they wouldn’t believe me, because it just sounded so outlandish. I said, “Well, give me your credit card, I’ll show you.” And people would give me their credit card just to do a demo. So I had a lot of subscribers to that. Being able to do that all via cellular phone was just insane back then.
Gabriel: I think it’s a really important thing that you did, which is maybe partially without knowing it, you pioneered this whole concept of remote work, which became a huge topic during the pandemic, of course, but you showed that it could be done.
Steve: Isn’t that funny? That wasn’t what I set out to do and it certainly would have happened eventually anyway, obviously, but yeah, I think, I don’t know of anybody else who was using these tools while mobile that far back.
Gabriel: No, the technological barriers to entry at that time were just way too high. So it took somebody with your skillset to do that. And the fact that you did it while bicycling instead of, in theory, you could have done it from a real Winnebago, then that makes it even cooler.
Steve: Aw, thanks. It was fun. The nice thing about it, I think for me personally, is that it was just endlessly motivating. I think I would have burned out using any other method.
Gabriel: That does bring us, though, to the final chapter. After so many miles on the road and so much productivity on the road, articles written, media appearances, tours, I guess you did decide that it was time to stop pedaling and what process went through your mind when you got off the road?
Steve: Well, I joke that I just got overloaded. I was learning Japanese at the time. Imagine, I was learning Japanese and I bought some books in Lansing, Michigan, and couldn’t fit them into the BEHEMOTH trailer. I went, “All right, that’s it!” That’s obviously not the real reason. But I think I just realized, you know, I’ve been here before. I’ve been doing this for a long time. I haven’t died yet miraculously. And I’m going to if I keep this up. And it’s also really hard. So I had a speaking gig coming up somewhere. You know, I should just buy a mobile lab or buy a trailer and turn it into a mobile lab. Then I can park it here and there and go on smaller trips or go on trips where I want to or whatever. The plan was unclear, but it was clearly time to do something different. So I did. What that turned into in practice was like a year of just being on the speaking circuit. And then I started schmoozing, looking for a lab, because somewhere in there when I was bicycling up the coast of Wisconsin, I was started to fantasize about water and kayaking and little multi-hulls and things like that. And I won’t go into the whole Microship story, but that was the next project. And basically the next 10 years was doing this sort of thing. But on an amphibian pedal/solar/sail microtrimaran. So it took a few false starts to get there with different kinds of hulls that didn’t work out and so on. But I finally ended up building this little boat that I could pedal at about four knots and sail at whatever, depending on the wind. You know, I’ve been over 10 a couple of times. And sailing is like the only thing where you get excited about 10 miles an hour. And also electric thruster with solar panels and things. And with deployable landing gear, some things never change. So that was about the next decade and that was done around 2001.
Gabriel: Well, you didn’t get stuck on any hills at least.
Steve: No, there’s none on water. Transient ones, waves, but… I mean, it comes with its own interesting challenge. You know, the problem is that water corrodes, but saltwater corrodes, absolutely.
Gabriel: Yeah, good to keep in mind. There’s a lot of advantages, but that’s one disadvantage to being on water.
Steve: Although I love it. I’ve been living on a boat for years now and stuff, although I haven’t been cruising lately and I miss it. Life choices and getting stuck and all that stuff. I still live aboard a boat and I commute, which is not very efficient. But I had the lab on the boat for a while and it was just too much. And I was getting really cramped in there, even with a 50-foot boat. I went through a couple of spaces in town where I live here and now I have this… At least I’ve got a nod to mobility still, although it’s not that mobile. But it’s a 48-foot cargo trailer designed for race car hauling. That’s where I’m sitting right now. And it’s a time machine. It’s full of media digitizing equipment from one end to the other. And I do people’s old home movies and I’m doing oral histories from a nearby island and just about every flavor of video and audio tape and reels and slides and negatives and other stuff. So it’s turned into an accidental business, I guess.
Gabriel: You went from the accidental bicycle tours to the accidental digitizing business.
Steve: Right. Well, you know, my dad died and I got his own whole movies and I started digging into it and thought, this is insane. I don’t know where to send these things. I just, you know, go into this rabbit hole online and hear horror stories of places that send them offshore for cheap labor or there’s ones that are awful. But there’s also ones that are really good. But how do you know? And, you know, I thought, okay, fine. I’ll just put together a system to do it myself and, you know, then I’ll eBay all that and get on with my life, except that last little bit didn’t happen.
Gabriel: Yes, sadly, and this is a bit ironic because you’re currently in the business of digitizing media, the book that you wrote way back in the day is not available digitally.
Steve: Oh, God. It was a publishing industry horror story. I mean, with editorial musical chairs and, you know, another publisher and fraud and just, oh, it was all this stuff. And so I have this wonderful book that – I’ve got a copy in my hand right here – And people are always asking for it. And I say, well, maybe there’s a used one on Amazon. I don’t know. I don’t get any nickels for that. So it’s crazy. I’ve got to get this thing back out, especially with, well, obvious history.
Gabriel: We’ll definitely, later on, let people know that it’s available and how they can read it and or listen to it as it were.
Steve: You know, people don’t read like they used to anyway. And, you know, I’m holding up my hand here to indicate guilty as charged. I’ve got all this equipment, including teleprompter and Stream Deck and ATEM Mini and all this stuff. I have an entire production studio. So maybe I should just read the damn thing, chapter by chapter, and drop in sound effects and pictures and just tell the story, and scope it however I want, and let YouTube be the delivery vehicle. And then maybe when it’s all done hit print also.
Gabriel: That’s an interesting idea.
Steve: I don’t know how good it is. You know, I don’t know how much people want to listen to somebody reading stories with static images and then more and more video clips over time. I think it will be good. At least I know I have a fan base who would like it, but whether that’s big enough, I have no idea. I’m not personally much of a consumer of audiobooks and things, so it’s hard for me to make something in a medium that I don’t really consume.
Gabriel: Anything else from this wild time with the bikes that we’ve left out?
Steve: More of an abstract comment, actually. I lived in Columbus for four years before I started this trip and I look back now at those four years and it feels like it just was a blip in my life. There’s so few details in my memory that I could tell the whole story in a few pages of text and consider it pretty detailed. And then I go from that to doing this bike trip for maybe the same basic amount of time, actually, on the road, not building things. And it’s like a huge percentage of my life. I’m fascinated by that sort of subjective life extension because when you have lots of waypoints and adventures and changes in people and beginnings and all this stuff, you have all these memories so it stretches out. And if you’re just doing the same thing every day, like, you know, digitizing videos, then it ends up being this sort of repeating pattern that is identical and you don’t have that depth of memory. So to make life seem longer, do that. And it works. I mean, it really works. Looking back at, I mean, while it was happening, it felt like it was just flying by because so much was going on. But in retrospect, it’s certainly the richest thing I can imagine having done.
Gabriel: Yeah, and you were operating in so many domains and at the intersection of so many different up-and-coming technologies. You were at the right time, at the right place, you could say, because I think even a few years earlier, it simply would not have been possible, even if you had that idea.
Steve: Right.
Gabriel: You can’t get much slower than a couple of hundred baud, because then you’re not transmitting anything at all.
Steve: I probably would have still enjoyed a bicycle trip, but it would have been a bicycle trip.
Gabriel: And it’s just such an interesting coincidence that the BEHEMOTH was built mostly on the Sun Microsystems campus in Mountain View, which is really only a very short distance from the Computer History Museum, where the BEHEMOTH is today.
Steve: That’s right. Is that the old SGI campus?
Gabriel: Yeah.
Steve: Yeah, that’s so cool. Yeah, I love that place. I haven’t been there in nine years or something, but I’m so happy to have the bike there. It just belongs. And I always get these interesting comments from people who saw it and hearing stories and want… meeting you! It’s just for a few years, BEHEMOTH was just sitting in the lab becoming a really bad shelf and also being the lab stereo, which, you know, there’s better ways to do that. And every now and then, I’d load it up in a Mothership, big mobile cargo trailer, and take it on a speaking tour and do that kind of thing. But it’s not a great ending for this bike after all those years. Having it go to the museum, I’m just really delighted. And after I’m long gone, it’ll be there, which makes me happy.
Gabriel: The transcript for this episode is available on the Accidental Bicycle Tourist website. I welcome feedback and suggestions for this and other episodes. You’ll find a link to all contact information in the show notes. If you would like to rate or review the show, you can do that on your favorite podcast platform. You can also follow the podcast on Instagram. Thank you to Anna Lindenmeier for the cover artwork and to Timothy Shortell for the original music. This podcast would not be possible without continuous support from my wife Sandra. And thank you so much for listening. I hope the episode will inspire you to get out and see where the road leads you.
Steve: Oh, there it is. I made a red light. Okay. Now I can stop fiddling with it. You know me. I don’t understand all this technical stuff.
Show Notes
Steve Roberts has a website, Nomadic Research Labs, with a wealth of information about his computerized bicycles and his other projects.
Steve’s appearance on The Phil Donahue Show can be found here.