Kiel Bryant Hosier's CompuBots


As featured in Wired News!

The MacBot! ...a walking Fat Mac, the one that started it all

Your curator's words about why the CompuBots are cool:

These sketches are whimsical treatments of the "great ancestors" of a current and future computers. In a sense this is vintage computing meets Terminator 3, Return of the Machines. After all, what would the sentient descendent of the Mac look like?

Kiel's words about the CompuBots:

They sleep at the foot of my bed.

Every night, staring into the black. Vintage computer systems. Old, loyal. As an aspiring conceptual designer, it's never been very difficult for me to imagine them walking away on robot-legs. But it wasn't until I needed something new to illustrate that a very rambunctious MacBot demanded to be drawn. Pencil met paper, and all you see below were born.

Certain were unusually difficult -- an original design might have been a practical compu-bot, but did it properly honor its progenitor? Thus the process became an evolution: sometimes cycling through FOUR to SIX radical style-changes before settling down into a suitable form.

Even with all of that, I never tire of them (completely). Because of that I can promise . . . more to come!

The CompuBots

Altex The Alto three wheeler Xerox PARC never built	Audron From the dazzling, elegant 3Com Audrey
cC3-][e A Borg-assimilated Apple ][e	Lisamatic Grown from a figment of Apple's adorable past its the Lisa 2
PETron Of Commodore's all-in-one solution: the PET 2001	MITSobu (version 5.0) after the legendary "first PC," the MITS Altair 8800, and with a legendary development of its own
New!... OsBot a much more portable (ie it walks itself!) version of the Osborne 01	Last but not least... CrayBot!!! a mobile version the Cray 1 Supercomputer

New!... GRiDroid
Pride of generals in the early 1980s, their fear in the 2020s!
See our pages on the GRiD Compass II

Meet Kiel!
or
Contact Kiel directly via e-mail: citizensane@mac.com

Also see Rich Didday's Finite State Fantasies

See the Mac at 20, our special exhibit on rare Mac artifacts