StNsn Rob~rt$ upioads a
day's worth ol wrtting Into
the nearest pertÄa roadside
pay phone. From thero it
travols to a network like The
WELL, where it cen be sont
diroc~ly to a typosetting
m3chine, as this 3ditle was.

All the comforts of heme and

- otšc.. A tent. A stovo. A
computer. A shonwave trans
n~itter. A CB radio. Solar-
recharged balteries. Naturally
the vsh~cie ~s du~bed
the Winnebiko.

My new mobile office is different. It
materializes wherover and whenever I
need itÄand though ~here are plenty
of distractions, I never have the same
one twice. By its very nature, my mobile
office is a seimulating place (somerimes
even a thrilling one), and for the first
time in my career, worRing is as at least
as much fun as playing. In fact, they
are inseparable.

I live in a world that is part bicycie, part
computer network, and part kaleido-
scopic amalgam of lifestyles that span
the full spectrum of human behavior.
1~1y office is a computerized, 36-speed,
220-pound, 8-foot-long recumbent bi-
cycie bedecked with solar panels and
enough gizmology to re-seed Silicon

Valley after the Big One. While traveling
full eime on this machine, I maintain a
freelance writing businessÄthe ideal
way to ger paid for playing. With occa-
sional layovers for major projects, I
have been doing this since late 1983,
cranking out some four million pedal
strokes, and about the same number
of keystrokes.

This all may sound idyllic and romantic,
but making such a caper work requires
much more than chutipah and leg
muscies. How can an intense,
information-oriented businessÄan ac-
eivity that depends on word processing,
photocopying, proposals, filing, business
planning, inwoicing, and all thatÄbe
operated from a pedal-powered con-
trivance upon which every ounce
counts? }low can the illusion of stability
be maintained when dealing with such
stald institutions as banks and insurance
companies7 And, perhaps most impor-
tant, what are the tools that have
allowed me to break the chains that once
bound me to my desk and n~ake a living
anywhere with vireually no overhead?

The electronic cottage on wheels that
supports my nomadic lifestyle wouid
have been impossible as recently as five
years ago. I harbor over a megabyte of
memory on board, serving a ciosely
linked network of five microprocessors
that work tagether in a variety of ways.
The systems all run on solar power.
They roll down the road aboard the
latest in human-powered vehicie design.
And they comn~unicate with the rest of
ehe informeelon universe through com-
puter networks and packet satellite
links. My i'Winnebiko" grows as
technology grows, slowly evolving along
with changes in device physics and soft-
ware philosophy.

In a sense, of course, this entire caper is
a caricatureÄbue it is an instructive
and entertaining one, applicable to a

wide range of lifestyles and businesses.
My "CoFnputing Across America" ad-
venture is a case of personal computers
and network communication carried to
an exqulsitely mad extreme.

INFORMAT10N FLOW

The essence of ~he journey is informa-
tion. I inhale it, store it, fiddle wich it,
and disgorge it in the endless attempt
to keep myself alive in the mercurial
freelance writing busines~s. This is an
ideal enterprise for a nomadic general-
ist, of course, for everyth~ng is copy
(and words have no mass).

But writing on the road turns out to
be an interesting challenge, particularly
when the load-carr~ing capacity is tbet
of a bicycie instead of a motor home.
Cassette diccadon i5 a pain, yielding
nan-editable speech that never seems to
get transcribed. Stopping to jot notes is
too much trauble. It has to be electronic.

During my first 10~000 mRes, I carried
onty one computer. Though it was an
astonishingly robust system (the Hewlett-
Packard Portable PWS), I still couidn't
write while riding. Since 10,000 miles
corresponds to roughly 1,000 hours of
pure pedaling time (half a business year),
this is no small matterÄI had far too
many days of good ideas, good inten-
tions, and no work output.

What I needed in addition to the HP
was a bike-mounted system, an elec-
tronic web to capture my ideas like
passing butterilies and store them for
later processing. I wanted to find a
machine that wouid support word pro-
cessing, long-term file storage, daily
eleceronic mail, and a nunnber of other
information-processing functions . . .
all on the bicycie itself.

But commercial computers were made
for desktops, not bikeeops. I took a
year's sabbatical from the road and |
dedicated myself eo building a differen -

