4 ms·

Microship.com: The Library of Technomadics

111 points by mmastrac 6y ago

aspenmayer 6y ago
This is the Computing Across America guy, Steven K. Roberts. I saw only that book cover online as a young computer enthusiast and was inspired. Here’s a recent post from his blog and another article I found about his projects. Thanks for sharing. https://microship.com/digitizing-our-lives/ https://microship.com/digitizing-our-lives/ https://hackaday.com/2009/09/18/vintage-video-computing-across-america/ https://hackaday.com/2009/09/18/vintage-video-computing-acro...
- wglb 6y ago
  I met him at Dayton shortly after the book came out. He was a geek among geeks.
kimburgess 6y ago
This site is wild. Such absolute, passionate geekery - it’s beautiful. The name annoys me endlessly though. I also live on a boat, Microship, which was named without checking domain availability. For anyone who enjoys endless engineering rabbit holes, I’d highly recommend boat life. It’s quite the ride.
- inasio 6y ago
  Huh, I just realized Microship is a popular boat name, I was just sailing last week on a 23 foot sailboat also called Microship (Pacific Northwest)
- owenversteeg 6y ago
  Hey, another HN liveaboard! I live on my 10m steel cabin cruiser in the Netherlands that I built myself from a bare hull :) I'll put up some photos if anyone's interested. Where in the world do you liveaboard, and what do you live on, if you don't mind me asking? Any other liveaboards here on HN? We should form a club :) (and I completely agree, microship.com is incredible!)
  - kimburgess 6y ago
    Nice! I'm on a rather odd looking ~11m steel power cat in Australia. Currently rebuilding it from the hull with my partner. Built like a tank and a lot of fun to quite literally hack on. I'll eventually get around to putting together an engineering blog for some of the projects, but the domain just points to an instagram account with high level summaries for now: https://ourtinyboat.com https://ourtinyboat.com.
  - BlackNitrogen 6y ago
    Yeah, why not, post away.
ratww 6y ago
This is one of the first websites I accessed in my life! Discovery Channel used to have a show about the internet in the 90s where it featured this guy and his bicycle, and the name stuck with me. So when I finally bought a modem it was one of the sites I accessed. I even remember linking it from my personal website back in 1996 or 1997. Here's the video: https://microship.com/microship-project-on-cyberlife-discovery-channel-1996/ https://microship.com/microship-project-on-cyberlife-discove...
- dang 6y ago
  Wow, the Internet Archive has it every year back to 97. Don't usually see that. https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://microship.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://microship.com/
  - markjgraham 6y ago
    We try! :-)
madamelic 6y ago
How do you get into having a life like this? Is it just building a passion project / idea then expanding if others enjoy + sponsor it. It seems like he was the main dude on everything from construction to software. I assume this would also mean getting an MS or PhD to be able to teach college courses?
- pstuart 6y ago
  > How do you get into having a life like this? Stay single and childless ;-)
- UweSchmidt 6y ago
  There are a lot of people who drop out a bit and travel around the world. There are also lot of weird projects in the kickstarter world. Combine the two, do some social media, finance it all through parents, kickstarter, patreon and corporate sponsors and off you go on your machine learning-enabled unicycle.
- brudgers 6y ago
  The starting point does not seem to be applying to grad school, at least in this case. The starting point seems to be building a bicycle. The interesting thing about bicycle projects is scale. They are detailed engineering projects but manageable by a single person from design through prototyping through delivery. Basically the average person can build a bicycle on their own through persistence. The hard part is accepting a bicycle in the present when the dream is a boat and peddling for a few decades to make the boat happen. In an important sense, the computer geekery is the least interesting part. It could have been a musician with a harpsichord. Sure the technology is interesting in its own right. But the bicycle makes it a story about autonomy and autonomy is the theme of the tail.
kkotak 6y ago
Considering the amount of anxiety reading about this type of lifestyle induces in me, shows how much of a fear of unknown some of us live in perpetually.
- brudgers 6y ago
  I totally relate to that. What slowly changed me was travel. Each time I travelled expanded my comfort zone...and the early trips were just normal things like visiting family and nearby towns for working a part time side job. Though a reason it worked for me might be that I did not travel to be pampered or in quest of luxury. So the explicit differences were mostly ordinary equivalencies not level of service oriented.
PoachedSausage 6y ago
I remember reading about his bike in, I think, Wired magazine when I was growing up in the 90's. Very inspiring. Now he lives on a boat and appears to have a better equipped (and better organised) lab and workshop than I do living in a house. Still inspiring 30 years later.
ChuckMcM 6y ago
I aspire to have a mobile lab as cool as Steve's. I have known Steve since the Winnebiko days, I met him at a conference and later Sun Labs hosted his lab efforts so I got a chance to work with him on various mobility ideas. It was always inspiring to just brainstorm about things. He started using fiber glass covered cardboard for the bike 'bags' and I used the same technique to build a helmet / grocery box for my scooter. If civilization collapses you want him on your team :-)
nym 6y ago
Steven K. Roberts is amazing. He was very influential on my ideas around technology when I was about 12. Super awesome guy. Never afraid of living on the bleeding edge
UweSchmidt 6y ago
It seems that most of his bespoke designs didn't lend themselves to reuse and further refinement. There was no open source community to maintain and advance his inventions and no manufacturer seems to have come out with things like touch-based security systems or watercooled helmets. Maybe this kind of geekery is dead anyway; overshadowed by the startup dream, bought up wholesale by FAANG salaries and crushed by the threat of a whiteboard job interview?
fernly 6y ago
Thanks for posting this reminder. I never met Roberts but whenever I lead a tour at the Computer History Museum I walk by the Winnebiko. It's on display there, looking just like the top left picture on the above page. (Also, I have spent a lot of time in Friday Harbor so can attest he's chosen a lovely place to settle.)

111 points by mmastrac 6y ago

This is the Computing Across America guy, Steven K. Roberts. I saw only that book cover online as a young computer enthusiast and was inspired. Here’s a recent post from his blog and another article I found about his projects. Thanks for sharing. https://microship.com/digitizing-our-lives/ https://microship.com/digitizing-our-lives/ https://hackaday.com/2009/09/18/vintage-video-computing-across-america/ https://hackaday.com/2009/09/18/vintage-video-computing-acro...

wglb 6y ago
I met him at Dayton shortly after the book came out. He was a geek among geeks.

kimburgess 6y ago

This site is wild. Such absolute, passionate geekery - it’s beautiful. The name annoys me endlessly though. I also live on a boat, Microship, which was named without checking domain availability. For anyone who enjoys endless engineering rabbit holes, I’d highly recommend boat life. It’s quite the ride.

inasio 6y ago
Huh, I just realized Microship is a popular boat name, I was just sailing last week on a 23 foot sailboat also called Microship (Pacific Northwest)
owenversteeg 6y ago
Hey, another HN liveaboard! I live on my 10m steel cabin cruiser in the Netherlands that I built myself from a bare hull :) I'll put up some photos if anyone's interested. Where in the world do you liveaboard, and what do you live on, if you don't mind me asking? Any other liveaboards here on HN? We should form a club :) (and I completely agree, microship.com is incredible!)
- kimburgess 6y ago
  Nice! I'm on a rather odd looking ~11m steel power cat in Australia. Currently rebuilding it from the hull with my partner. Built like a tank and a lot of fun to quite literally hack on. I'll eventually get around to putting together an engineering blog for some of the projects, but the domain just points to an instagram account with high level summaries for now: https://ourtinyboat.com https://ourtinyboat.com.
- BlackNitrogen 6y ago
  Yeah, why not, post away.

ratww 6y ago

This is one of the first websites I accessed in my life! Discovery Channel used to have a show about the internet in the 90s where it featured this guy and his bicycle, and the name stuck with me. So when I finally bought a modem it was one of the sites I accessed. I even remember linking it from my personal website back in 1996 or 1997. Here's the video: https://microship.com/microship-project-on-cyberlife-discovery-channel-1996/ https://microship.com/microship-project-on-cyberlife-discove...

dang 6y ago
Wow, the Internet Archive has it every year back to 97. Don't usually see that. https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://microship.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://microship.com/
- markjgraham 6y ago
  We try! :-)

madamelic 6y ago

How do you get into having a life like this? Is it just building a passion project / idea then expanding if others enjoy + sponsor it. It seems like he was the main dude on everything from construction to software. I assume this would also mean getting an MS or PhD to be able to teach college courses?

pstuart 6y ago
> How do you get into having a life like this? Stay single and childless ;-)
UweSchmidt 6y ago
There are a lot of people who drop out a bit and travel around the world. There are also lot of weird projects in the kickstarter world. Combine the two, do some social media, finance it all through parents, kickstarter, patreon and corporate sponsors and off you go on your machine learning-enabled unicycle.
brudgers 6y ago
The starting point does not seem to be applying to grad school, at least in this case. The starting point seems to be building a bicycle. The interesting thing about bicycle projects is scale. They are detailed engineering projects but manageable by a single person from design through prototyping through delivery. Basically the average person can build a bicycle on their own through persistence. The hard part is accepting a bicycle in the present when the dream is a boat and peddling for a few decades to make the boat happen. In an important sense, the computer geekery is the least interesting part. It could have been a musician with a harpsichord. Sure the technology is interesting in its own right. But the bicycle makes it a story about autonomy and autonomy is the theme of the tail.

kkotak 6y ago

Considering the amount of anxiety reading about this type of lifestyle induces in me, shows how much of a fear of unknown some of us live in perpetually.

brudgers 6y ago
I totally relate to that. What slowly changed me was travel. Each time I travelled expanded my comfort zone...and the early trips were just normal things like visiting family and nearby towns for working a part time side job. Though a reason it worked for me might be that I did not travel to be pampered or in quest of luxury. So the explicit differences were mostly ordinary equivalencies not level of service oriented.

PoachedSausage 6y ago

I remember reading about his bike in, I think, Wired magazine when I was growing up in the 90's. Very inspiring. Now he lives on a boat and appears to have a better equipped (and better organised) lab and workshop than I do living in a house. Still inspiring 30 years later.

ChuckMcM 6y ago

I aspire to have a mobile lab as cool as Steve's. I have known Steve since the Winnebiko days, I met him at a conference and later Sun Labs hosted his lab efforts so I got a chance to work with him on various mobility ideas. It was always inspiring to just brainstorm about things. He started using fiber glass covered cardboard for the bike 'bags' and I used the same technique to build a helmet / grocery box for my scooter. If civilization collapses you want him on your team :-)

nym 6y ago

Steven K. Roberts is amazing. He was very influential on my ideas around technology when I was about 12. Super awesome guy. Never afraid of living on the bleeding edge

UweSchmidt 6y ago

It seems that most of his bespoke designs didn't lend themselves to reuse and further refinement. There was no open source community to maintain and advance his inventions and no manufacturer seems to have come out with things like touch-based security systems or watercooled helmets. Maybe this kind of geekery is dead anyway; overshadowed by the startup dream, bought up wholesale by FAANG salaries and crushed by the threat of a whiteboard job interview?

fernly 6y ago

Thanks for posting this reminder. I never met Roberts but whenever I lead a tour at the Computer History Museum I walk by the Winnebiko. It's on display there, looking just like the top left picture on the above page. (Also, I have spent a lot of time in Friday Harbor so can attest he's chosen a lovely place to settle.)