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BICYCLE ODYSSEY OF A HIGH-TECH NOMAD

(Computing Across America, Chapter 1)



by



Steven K. Roberts, HtN. (WORDY)

Columbus, Ohio

May 28, 1986





     Computing Across America -- what's this?  A collection of articles about

eccentrics with micros?  Tales of satellite socializing?  Computer industry

forecasts written in academic third-person boring?

     Heh.  Anything but.  Did you ever want to break the chains that bind you

to your desk and just take off, wandering the planet while making a living

doing whatever it is you love the most?  Seems reasonable enough... and three

years ago I did just that.  Since then, I have been living in an electronic

cottage on human-powered wheels, and through this column I'm going to share my

adventures with you.

     Yes, we'll be covering the burning issues of the day:  Adventure, love,

danger, weird people, radical extremes of network living, fulltime travel,

high-speed flights down mountain roads mottled with Aspen-shade, mycological

tone poems, unexpected ice caves, bizarre contraptions, ham radio, satellites,

a 200-pound bicycle worth $100 a pound, real-life wizards, regional humor,

outlandish microprocessor applications, ridiculous comments, random

controversy, moments of pure anguish, and so much fun that something about it



      I am an agent of future shock -- a high-tech nomad, a pedal- pushing

freelance writer head over heels in love with that sweet piece of asphalt known

as The Road.  My home, if I can be said to have one, is Dataspace; my vehicle,

the Wondrous Winnebiko.  My computer is a Hewlett-Packard Portable PLUS.  Yes,

I work for a living:  my business is to have a wildly exciting life and then

tell people about it.

     (It's a lousy job, but someone's gotta do it.)

     I'd like to introduce myself here on GEnie, for I intend to hang around a

while.  This is the first of a series -- a collection of tales too strange to

predict and too diverse to summarize -- an ongoing travelogue of a romantic

high-tech bicycle odyssey.  As I move into the second 10,000 miles of this

open-ended journey, I have switched networks and suddenly find myself in a

whole new community. (Why should I restrict my nomadics to *physical* space?

Howdy, neighbor.)

     So lemme settle in here and take an angle-bracketed <sip> of compu-booze,

then tell you a story...









     In September of 1983, I sold my 3-bedroom ranch home in Midwestern

Suburbia and moved to an 8-foot-long computerized recumbent bicycle bedecked

with solar panels and enough gizmology to start a science museum.  I quickly

discovered that this was not to be just another bike tour.  Using CompuServe as

my link with the universe, I maintained a full-time freelance writing business

while pedaling a 9,760-mile journey around the United States.

     I lived for the moment -- and it had many.  During the 18-month adventure,

I fell in love both on- and off-line, encountered a band of convicts in the

Maryland woods, sailed through the Gulf of Mexico, tempted fate more than once,

and learned more than I could have ever imagined.  I overheated in West Texas,

froze my ass in Utah, discovered Key West hedonism, and explored the California

mystique. In Santa Fe, I saw firsthand the symbiosis between hawker and gawker;

in Crested Butte, I witnessed a community so close that everybody's biological

cycles are synchronized.  I ate crawfish, oysters, and GORP -- I prowled the

country seeking the exotic, sexy, and bizarre.  The stories flowed like hot

breath, and soon the media turned its unblinking eye on me as a high-tech

curiosity, a peripatetic eccentric, a symbol of freedom.  "Charles Kurault on a

bicycle," gushed one local TV station as I pedaled into a perfect cliche of

sunset.

     And I came to realize, looking back into the eyes of all those people

looking wistfully at me, that the greatest risk of all is taking no risk.  I

noticed (once I stopped trying to score new states) that if you think too much

about where you're going you lose respect for where you are.  And I dedicated

myself to resolving the classic trade-off of freedom versus security -- a task

I think I've finally accomplished.

     Ah, and the people.  When you look like something out of a nonviolent

version of "The Road Warriors," you tend to open a lot of doors.  Even if most

of them turn out to be closets, the numbers are there:  I spent months probing

the asymptotes of America and finding brilliance in the *oddest* of places.  I

found communities ranging from the vaporous to the ancient, and was tempted

time and again by their seductive tug.  And I glimpsed the potential of life

online, a life outside the strictures of physics, beyond the limits imposed by

image and prejudice.  In the electronic pub, brain meets brain and conversation

ranges from the baudy to the sublime.

     Life aboard the Winnebiko is a life of extremes.  I am at once a being of

cloud and soil, satellite and bicycle -- living two simultaneous lives.  One is

visceral, sweaty, attuned to every hill and headwind -- the other is ethereal,

intellectual, an electronic interlocking of imagination and communication.

Something about the contrast casts both aspects into sharp relief, and I

suppose I've become something of an online proselytizer.

     9,760 miles.  The journey wound down a year ago in the frenzy of

approaching book deadline -- along with the exhaustion of some 2.5 million

pedal cranks and over 200 different beds.  (Time for the commercial:  the book

is called *Computing Across America:  The Bicycle Odyssey of a High-tech

Nomad*.  It's being published this fall by Learned Information.)

     Anyway, the bicycle sat dormant for a few months in a Silicon Valley

attic, then found its way back to the land of its origins for six months on the

operating table.  And that brings us (far too quickly) to today.







     It's happening again; I can feel it.  Every daydream involves the Road;

any new purchase has to be something "bikeable."  The journey is obsession,

addiction, religion, and lifestyle of choice -- by August I'll be rolling.

Ahh.

     But there are differences a-plenty.  The Winnebiko is again the substrate,

but it's now layered with more exotic systems than ever. Not including

dedicated controllers and "smart logic," there are four on-board computers --

along with a satellite data link, ham radio station, and navigation equipment.

     The biggest problem on the first trip involved time management, something

that affects nomads as much as it does executives.  I spent roughly half a

business year pedaling -- 1,000 hours sitting alone on the bike.  I would

cruise all day across American vastness, composing tales in my head and itching

to get my hands on the H-P Portable riding behind me.  ("Ah, such a chapter

shall this be!")  But by evening I would be tired and hungry and surrounded by

people clamoring for stories... and the day's ideas would drift away like the

smells of camp cooking, gone without so much as a memory of the insights that

spawned them.  Wasted.

     And so the bike has become a rolling word processor.  There are two liquid

crystal displays on the console in front of me, and a keyboard built into the

under-seat handlebars (eight buttons for text along with various other

controls).  A dedicated 68HC11 microprocessor performs key code conversion

while attending to bicycle management tasks, decoding finger combinations based

upon an arcane letter- frequency-based coding scheme.

     Whenever a valid character comes along, the 68HC11 passes it off to a

handful of CMOS logic that is interfaced to the guts of a Model 100 -- making

everything described so far look exactly like the original Radio Shack

keyboard.  The net effect is a full screen editor that I can control while

pedaling.

     But it doesn't stop there.  An RS-232 line allows text in the tiny 32K

buffer to be transferred to the 896K Hewlett-Packard system -- and from there

to disk via the 3.5-inch floppy drive.  Two modems cover all combinations of

pay phones and modular jacks, and a fourth processor (CMOS Z80) handles AX.25

protocol control for packet data communications through the 2-meter ham

transceiver... which will soon include an orbiting electronic mailbox known as

Packsat. Of course, all this takes power, and the original 5 Watt solar panel

has been replaced with a pair of 10 Watt Solarex units -- along with 8

amp-hours of Nickel-Cadmium battery to hold it all.  Other electrical loads on

the Winnebiko II include twin air horns, lights, flashers, Etak electronic

compass, paging-type security system with distributed sensors, CB radio, stereo

system, cassette deck for dictation and music, digital shortwave receiver, and

the usual speed- distance-time-cadence instrumentation.

     "Are yew with NASA?" asked the Ohio farmer, slowly chawin' tobacco while

peering at the strange apparition gleaming beside the small-town pay phone.

     "Sure," I answered, looking up from my online session on the burning

pavement.  "This here's one o' them Loony Excursion Modules."







     It will be August before everything (inluding the business structure,

subject of my next article) is working well enough for me to abandon this tacky

apartment complex to experience, once again, the pure exuberance of full-time

travel.  Once on the road, I'll publish weekly updates on GEnie; in the

meantime, I'll post an occasional message to let you know how the preparations

are coming.  I welcome your responses, suggestions, and invitations for the

hospitality database (another of the H-P's jobs) -- I can be reached via GEmail

as WORDY.

     And maybe somewhere, out there, we'll meet.  I'll spend my life prowling

neighborhoods electronic and physical, pausing for months at a time to explore

and touch the magic.  I guess that's the point of all this... I finally figured

how to get paid for being a generalist. And I couldn't possibly do it without

computers and networks.

Ain't technology wonderful?



...Steven K. Roberts