BEHEMOTH – Big Electronic Human-Energized Machine, Only Too Heavy | Hacker News Reader

BEHEMOTH – Big Electronic Human-Energized Machine, Only Too Heavy

microship.com

174 pointsrobin_reala48 comments

I imagine a lot of people here might be too young to know about Steve K Roberts. He had an earlier bike called WINNEBIKO (II?). Imagine yourself as a kid in the 80s watching something like this on TV, it was super cool.

High-Tech Bike on Spectacular World of Guinness Records - 1988

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2G6DtfZFUU

Xerox PARC Winnebiko presentation by Steve Roberts - 1989

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pU6MXakwcjI

It's easy to overlook how inspiring this was without knowing about the context in which we lived back in the 80/90s. No one had cell phones, few people had computers, or had ever used a computer network, let alone the internet. I'm not sure I had even used a computer at the time, and I saw this guy on TV talking about being able to: write a book while riding his bike, talk to people all over the world via computer network, work remotely, it was poof mind blown. Like looking 15 years into the future.

Later on during University, after my first summer programming internship I read his book, "Computing Across America", which I highly recommend. For me at least, Steve was also kind of a lifestyle guru. Reading his book you realized you that you didn't have to be chained to a desk in an office, that technology would open up new lifestyles. It was a wake up moment where I tried to visualize my ideal life, and where the normal way of things was no longer interesting and something to avoid.

Steve Roberts has a youtube channel here:

https://www.youtube.com/c/microship/videos

I love the description of the community involved in building it. It brings to mind the quote from Antoine de St-Exupery:

“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

On the other hand, one has to wonder if he wouldn’t have needed a 105 speed transmission had he heeded that other famous quote:

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

> “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

I think the problem is he already had the bike. If he followed this maxim he wouldn’t have needed to start the project at all.

Oh, Microship and the Winnebiko!

I'm so happy to see this obscure uberhacker on HN.

Stories about this guy's exploits would be just the sort my ideal vision of HN would be exclusively populated by.

Real Hacker news.

His "A Decade of Microship Development"[1] is also well worth reading.

[1] - https://microship.com/microship-development/

I recently completed the initial build of a similar contraption, a 9 foot long recumbent trike with lots of cargo capacity. Picture here:

https://imgur.com/a/WrViRKD

Shaky YouTube walkaround here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3SEndDnVXg

I've been giving thought to how far I want to go with the electronics. LED lighting is a no brainer of course. I have red LED strips for the rear that will blink in patterns of my making. PWM will make it cool. But a Pi Zero W is just SO powerful as a bike computer- how far do I want to go with that? Wifi to a smart phone as a bike comuter display? Could work. Rear facing camera to check on traffic? Why not? Current gear and gear inches for three stage transmission?

A smart phone largely surpasses what Steve had available to him and what was used on his bike, and miniaturization means no need for a trailer unless you want the real estate for solar.

I don't know how far I'll go with mine. My main goal is to ride it and have fun. Maybe for the next build, I'll become a hardware developer and start writing code. Who knows?

And being an Amateur Radio operator, there are many battery operated portable QRP rigs that would be a lot of fun to operate from a bike- if you stop and set up a quick antenna, which is no big deal. There are even mobile HF antennas available, but those present a major compromise, and QRP (less than 10w power) is already a compromise.

So the real question to answer is: How geeky do I wanna be? I don't think I want to be as geeky as Steve was, but I also don't think I need to be. I don't expect to ride across the nation, just around the region ;)

I vaguely remember this as a kid. For those who are better readers than I, does this site describe what all the computer hardware actually does? I was expecting something like primitive turn-by-turn navigation, but there doesn't seem to be focus to this, just a whole lot of desktop hardware grafted on a bike. It doesn't make any sense even in an era before common mobile hardware.

Edit: While mobile hardware really didn't get good until 20 years later, the TRS-80 Model 100 existed in 1983 which had a real keyboard, could run third-party programs weighed under 4 pounds, had battery-backed memory and ran 20 hours on a set of 4 AA batteries. So a non-absurd solution for some portion of his design requirements existed.

its so he could connect to telnet, and write his book as he rode.

It's very dangerous to drive and write at the same time, I don't see how this is usable

He's biking so the reaction tolerances are much looser more so if he's following back roads with very few cars which is sounds like he was from the another post where he talks about atlases.

He uses chord typing using buttons built into the handles used to steer the bike. There's a claim that it's not that hard to learn.

With a physical keyboard, you can touch-type and keep your eyes on the road.

"BEHEMOTH, whether moving or parked, must provide maximum possible autonomy in power generation, computation capability, file storage, communication, navigation, and maintainability -- anywhere in the world, all controlled via a flexible graphic user interface..."

also:

"My original motive was simple enough. Horrified by a view of the American Dream from the curtained windows of a three-bedroom ranch in suburbia, doing things I didn't enjoy anymore to pay for things I really didn't want, I hit System Reset. Six months later, in the fall of 1983, I put my house on the market and moved to a recumbent bicycle -- I was a 30-year-old technomad heading across America with a primitive laptop, solar panel, and xnet connection..."

and later:

"I've had the dream over the years of putting together a nomadic community, a tribe of network-linked freelancers who move freely in physical space as whim, weather, and clients dictate. If this seems risky in these economically troubled times, remember that your real security is not what's in your bank account, but what's in your head. Skills are highly portable, and many of them can be wielded entirely via networks, phones, fax, pagers, satellites, and so on. If you are a wizard in some field, you will be welcome anywhere -- yet you can maintain the illusion of stability via methods that are now very familiar...

Technology has developed enough in the last few years that this idea, once rather fanciful, is now quite realistic. Virtually any information-based business can be operated from the road...

...it all points to one thing: getting away from your desk without simultaneously disappearing from Dataspace."

The Epson HX-20 existed even a bit earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epson_HX-20

I did a bit of programming for one, it was a rather neat machine.

BEHEMOTH was featured on the Discovery show NextStep back in the early 90s[0]. Roberts describes and shows off all the components. As I recall the most of the big hardware in the trailer was a printer/fax, a satellite phone, and ham radios. He had a PowerBook he used when not on the bike. You could definitely slim down a lot of stuff today or just eliminate it, you don't really need a printer or fax machine today and a smartphone has tons of connectivity.

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TgNPLH2SYtk

The Osborne Luggable seems appropriate, and it existed in 1981:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_1

I saw him talk in our elementary school, met him, and still have his book. He rode that thing all over the US and wrote a book while doing so. Most interesting thing about his setup was the custom keyboard mounted to the handlebars that was based on a stenographer type setup.

Can't be stopped for texting and driving if the laws for that don't exist yet!

What? No. as I recall he had 7 switches and just chorded ASCII

Details here: https://archive.org/details/73-magazine-1988-04/page/n43/mod...

73 Magazine, April 1988, page 43. Article says the switches are essentially ASCII, but with the bits shuffled so that lower alpha mainly falls under his strongest fingers. I'll let you read it for further details.

I wonder how light you could make this with current tech. A tablet computer + raspberry pi would cover most of the features, plus electrified with today's lithium batteries would make this a beast (pun intended) range-wise.

You could pretty much replace the whole thing with off-the-shelf stuff that fits in a backpack. Laptop, smartphone, tablet, a decent Bluetooth speaker, and you're good. Maybe some solar cells on the bag. You're still on your own for the handlebar keyboards. Get a couple Twiddlers and cram the guts into some grips, I guess.

And a trailer for nothing but camping gear instead of hauling around three desktop machines.

I remember following Steve Roberts at the time (probably on USENET). It's entertaining to think how much of the tech on BEHEMOTH could be replaced by a smart phone or tablet. There are a few things like the HAM radio, printer, and some of the head mounted stuff that you'd still need in order to duplicate all the functionality. The weight reduction and improvements to functionality would be amazing.

I really miss that time, when computers where something special, floppy-disk trade in school and that one guy with a Next-Cube without games but his father said it's the most powerful machine, and endless "Death Knights of Krynn" hours with friends....ok maybe i'am a 'adult' now...that's why, but IT really lost most of it's magic.

There are still geeks doing quirky and whimsical things with computers, there always will be. They are just harder to find in all the noise.

True, normally RetroComputer Clubs are a good starting point.

The noise is that everybody's trying to extract money out of computing.

The whimsy is in just enjoying it and exploring within it for its own sake, which is the willingness to simply put time & money _into_ it without that noise.

This is an insightful comment and applies to other pursuits as well — and don’t forget Sturgeon’s Law.

In some ways they are actually much easier to find.

Now we have makerspaces, like Noisebridge, chock full of geeks hacking on all sorts of crazy and interesting stuff.

There are forums like Hackaday and various engineering blogs and vlogs.

HN itself occasionally has a good lead.

All of these people are easily contactable now, whereas in the past you might struggle to get in touch with them even if you'd heard about them somehow, especially if they were in another country.

Now distance is not really an issue any more, and you can even do video communication with them, easily trade schematics or anything else you may wish to know or have pretty much instantly.

This is truly the golden age of hacking right now. Enjoy it while you can.

Pretty awesome. He had a binary keyboard, one button on each handlebar, and could type at 35 WPM using it. Impressive! I wonder if there is a market for that now, so people could text while biking. Or driving?

https://microship.com/on-the-loose-in-dataspace/

At 2 seconds per word you're probably better off with speech recognition. But it wouldn't work in loud traffic.

A throat microphone[1] might work.

Another interesting option would be some kind of subvocal recognition device.[2]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throat_microphone

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocal_recognition

BEHEMOTH hit the road in 1991. Speech recognition was... not a solved problem at that point in time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_NaturallySpeaking

“I wonder if there is a market for that _now_”

Ah yeah, I missed that.

I bicycle everywhere and I sure would not wanna try taking my attention off the road. Might be different if I was taking long cruises down the blue highways like Behemoth was designed for. And probably quiet enough for dictation to have a decent chance to work.

Two-finger keyboard sounds like something that goes in the bin of "weird keyboards only nerds with tons of time to learn to use them can love" though, right next to all the other chording keyboards people have made over the years...

Behemoth had speech recognition. Although I'm not sure it could do dictation.

SR is faster than 99% of the population can type. You can type for far longer than you can talk though.

Some of the linked articles mention macros such as OTR for on the road. That's one typed word for three written words.

It also apparently had speech recognition.

I'm very curious how capable this thing was. It has parts that sound familiar but the capabilities sound alien.

You mean like "Hey Siri"? Pretty sure BMW even had a commercial along these lines a couple years ago, although that may have only been TTS.

I'm having a hard time understanding what this handlebar binary keyboard really was. Did it literally only have two keys? I'm imagining something with at least 8 that decoded keypress combinations to ASCII characters.

e: Here is a direct link to the part of a NextStep segment that shows the handelbar keyboard in use, it appears to have at least 8 keys. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgNPLH2SYtk&t=1m21s

ee: Here's a link to the part in the video where he explains there are 7 keys per handgrip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgNPLH2SYtk&t=2m3s

What I am about to say is not supposed to be insulting or personal, just some observartions on relative culture. I spent a while reading the author's stories from the road, and what I found most interesting was the disdain the author expressed for "unenlightened" midwesterners, who are "intellectually torpid". This is a very interesting project, but maybe from their point of view, the author is wasting his capabilities on frivolous, selfish, and unsustainable persuits. I was also intrigued by the author's idea that only his, liberated view of public sexuality was correct. Reading between the lines, I also would be uncomfortable in a public setting if a nearby couple were being "openly sexual", and I don't think that's because I need some liberation.

It does give some interesting insight into the development of Bay Area culture and thought. Oddly enough, the modern Progressive views on liberated sexuality have come full circle, with now almost contractually-described processes.

I had Tadpole (my employer at the time) donate the SPARCbook.

BEHEMOTH was a cool project in its day. Imagine what could be done now.

http://eyetap.org/publications/

He stopped by where I worked [1]; The computer on a phone thing blew me away more that chorded typing on the fly.

I was still on V20/C64 without modems back then.

[1] https://halebikes.com/pictures/index.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus springs to mind.

"The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” -Albert Camus

How did it know its location?

Satellite uplink and GPS

In 1991?

It's explicitly described how and which parts were used.

Oh, oops. I Cmd-F'ed a bunch of things, and I thought GPS was one of them, but clearly not.

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