Launching a Gonzo Engineering Project I: What Is Gonzo Engineering? by Steven K. Roberts The infamous 580-pound, 105-speed BEHEMOTH, with Mac, SPARC, and DOS environments as well as satellite datacomm, HF/VHF/UHF ham radio, heads-up display, head mouse, handlebar keyboard, 6-level security system, speech synthesis, 72 watt solar array, and deployable landing gear to keep the monster upright on killer hills. The bike now resides in The Computer History Museum. With this issue we begin a series of articles unlike anything we’ve ever published. Steven K. Roberts has figured out how to live passionately, pursuing crazy dreams and building fantastic machines and going on amazing adventures. He calls what he does Gonzo Engineering, and in this series he tells you everything you need to know in order to pursue your own crazy gonzo engineering dream. A Grand Vision is only the beginning. No matter how much passion you bring to bear on the project of your dreams, the odds of actually escaping the “gravity well” are low... unless you find a way to leverage larger forces. This series, derived from 25 years of audacious feats of gonzo engineering, presents the keys to six tools that are essential to a large-scale project: • A Business Angle • Your Own Education • Corporate Sponsorship • Media Coverage • A Public Presence • The Team of Volunteers I contemplated publishing a book on this subject for years, and in 2009 I finally did, publishing the “trade secrets” that have made my adventures possible... the art of working with sponsors, media, and volunteers to get an insanely ambitious project off the ground and keep it moving on its own momentum. This series of articles is a refactoring of that material for a new audience. But fundamentally the intended audience is still the same: people who are attempting to “reach escape velocity” with a massive feat of engineering. It is not about hardware or software technical methods it is about the meta-hack of developing enough support and buzz to get your project to take on a life of its own. Large corporations can do this with brute-force methods (unlimited money and people), but individuals face daunting hurdles when competing for mindshare and resources. Without the ability to leverage larger forces as a sort of “martial art,” it is exceedingly difficult for a lone geek to escape the gravity well. My own strange career has been the proving ground for the techniques revealed here. In 1983 I took off across the US on a computerized recumbent bicycle, freelance writing and consulting while underway. This was bizarre at the time, though it would now be unremarkable. But the project took on a life of its own, and I eventually covered 17,000 miles on three versions of this increasingly geeky machine. With a handlebar chord keyboard, heads-up display and head mouse, console Macintosh, and 24/7 satellite net connection PragPub January 2013 27