With all the talk of the Titan project, it’s easy to forget that when it hits in 2020, it will hardly be the first Apple vehicle to take to the road. There have been predecessors, after all.
For example? The Behemoth, a 105-speed bike from 1991 that was powered by a hacked Macintosh computer!
BEHEMOTH stood for Big Electronic Human Energized Machine, Only Too Heavy, and as you might imagine, it was a one-off project by an affable computer nerd, and not an official Apple MacBike (not even John Sculley would approve that for sale).
The creation of a self-taught computer hobbyist named Steve Roberts and about 45 other engineers, machinists, and bike enthusiasts at Mountain View’s BikeLab, the Behemoth weighed 580 pounds, and contained three laptops — including a Mac — networked together, as well as a color LCD display, a satellite earth station, a CD player, a handlebar keyboard, and solar panels.
When you biked on the Behemoth, you wored a huge virtual reality helmet, which contained its own built-in sound system, air conditioner, mic, and even a sensor that allowed Roberts to navigate his Mac desktop while he was biking just by moving his head.
Here’s a fantastic snatch from Fusion.net’s article on the Behemoth, talking about the problems Roberts had separating the digital from the analog on his home-made MacBike.
Once, Roberts says, he was riding the BEHEMOTH in Wisconsin and saw a pretty girl. He turned to look, and gestured his mouse to click on her. It obviously didn’t work. “It was kind of interesting that I had gotten so involved in this system, that reality had become just another layer that didn’t quite fit the user interface,” he says. “It was frustrating.”
Ultimately, Roberts ended up biking 17,000 miles on the Behemoth, before donating it to the Computer History Museum, where it can still be seen.
Forget Titan. Hey Apple! How about re-releasing the Behemoth?
Source: Fusion.net
