The first digital nomad
Digital nomadism feels like a 2020s thing. Coffee shops, laptop stickers, the inevitable Instagram of the laptop in front of a beach. Most of the people doing it now think they’re living something new. They aren’t. Someone was already doing it forty years ago, on a bicycle.
I am not a digital nomad and probably never will be. The closest I get is taking a laptop to a café, which doesn’t count. The figure that interests me here isn’t the modern version of the trend, it’s the original one, who built the whole concept in 1983 with hardware that didn’t really exist yet for the use case.
Steven K. Roberts and “Behemoth”, taken from Teknomadics
A journey ahead of its time
In 1983, Steven K Roberts loaded a recumbent bicycle with solar panels, a computer, a ham radio and a stack of other gear and started pedaling across the United States. He called the bike “Winnebiko”. Later versions were “Winnebiko 2” and “Behemoth”.
The point of all that gear wasn’t just to travel. The point was to keep working while traveling. He wrote articles for “Computer Currents” magazine from the road, decades before “remote work” was a phrase anyone used. He was effectively running a job from a bike in 1983.
Steven and his second bike, taken from his website
Reactions at the time
Some people thought it was inspirational, a glimpse of what work could look like once technology caught up. Others thought it was nonsense. A stunt. An eccentric guy doing eccentric things on a bike, no real career possible from it.
Reading those reactions today is funny in a particular way. The “unrealistic notion” of remote work and digital nomadism is now a Tuesday for millions of people. The eccentric stunt turned out to be the early prototype of how a non-trivial chunk of the workforce now actually operates.
It’s not really a story about Roberts being smarter than everyone else. It’s a story about Roberts being earlier. The world catches up later or it doesn’t, and in this case it did.
A newspaper article, photo by Gizmo
What he’s doing now
Roberts kept going. After the bike journey he stayed on the technomadic track. Speaking, writing, building progressively more elaborate setups. Generally being one of the people who was right about something thirty years before everyone else figured it out.
He’s still working remotely. Just from a different vehicle now. A boat.
Roberts in his home, taken from The Journal of San Juan Islands
He paved the way
The honest read here is that Roberts wasn’t just early, he was building something that didn’t really make economic sense yet. Solar panels and a computer-stuffed recumbent bicycle in 1983 weren’t a viable lifestyle for anyone but him. Doing it wasn’t about the world being ready, it was about him being ready. The infrastructure showed up afterwards.
It mostly did show up. The internet revolution of the 90s and 2000s did the rest of the work, and now millions of people live a version of what he was already living back then. He just had the unfair disadvantage of doing it before any of the tools existed to make it easy.
Quote from Steven, far ahead of his time
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