Stephen Euin Cobb
Trivia
(In no particular order)
Two of Stephen’s novels were written on
a notebook computer while in the sleeper of his eighteen-wheeled “big-rig.”
These two novels have the distinction of having been written in every state in
the union except
Stephen Euin Cobb has worked as a bank
teller, construction worker, security guard, radiation
worker in a nuclear facility, computer programmer and long-haul truck driver.
When he was a teenager he won a
scholarship to study at the world famous Art Institute of
He become an
amateur astronomer at the age of thirteen; when, on a cold fall night in 1968
he propped his father’s little thirty-power spotting telescope on the hood of
the family Buick and found his first planet. It was the ringed planet: Saturn.
“It looked cold and pale and very small,” he says, “but it was clearly another
world—an alien world.”
He became a transhumanist in High School
while reading chapter 37 of Arthur C. Clarke’s novel 2001: a space odyssey. It would be more than twenty years before he
discovered there was a name for what he became on that day, and that he was not
the only one.
Stephen’s somewhat unusual middle name “Euin”
is pronounced like a contraction of the two words You in, with the emphasis placed on You. This was his father’s middle name, as well as
that of his father’s father. For a time
he believed it to be a Gaelic word which means young, but he has since
learned it is simply the Gaelic version of the Biblical name John.
He built and flew Estes brand model
rockets as a teenager.
Stephen used his first box camera
(which used B&W 124 film) to take crude photos of
the 1969 Apollo 11 lunar landing as he watched it live on TV. He still has those photos as well as the
negatives.
Worrying that he was not athletic
enough, his parents signed him up for little league baseball against his
wishes. He hated the scratchy wool uniform,
trying to hit a ball he was scared of and (while playing outfield) trying to
catch a ball he was certain he would drop.
The only people who hated his being there more were his teammates, who mentioned
this many times. This experience combined
with televised baseball games which randomly preempted his beloved reruns of
Star Trek (TOS) in the very early seventies produced his lifelong abhorrence of
all team sports.
He has watched two full baseball games and
almost an entire football game. The
baseball games were school field trips (Chicago Cubs and White Sox), and the
football game was a favorite of a woman he dated.
He was a cub scout but never a boy
scout.
Thanks to after-school reruns of Star
Trek and NASA’s widely televised lunar landings (and a few dozen second-hand
science fiction books) he developed a lifelong fascination with astronomy.
He has enjoyed many interests—chemistry,
psychology, theoretical physics, computer programming, the internet, the list is
long—but he has always returned to astronomy like an old friend. He sees it as
foundational to all other sciences since they all exist within its huge bounds.
Drawing during classes unrelated to art
got him in trouble a few times.
Despite the attention it brought him art
was not his true passion, that was science. Even when
very young, long before he learned to read, he had his mother read books to
him—books about dinosaurs. A decade before he even learned the word, he dreamed
of being a paleontologist.
Born in Orangeburg South
Very shy around girls, he didn’t kiss a
girl until he was nineteen, and didn’t marry until he was 43.
His father has been a Ham radio
operator since before Stephen was born.
In 1976, many years before he owned or
even touched a computer, Stephen subscribed to two computer magazines: Byte and
Computer Age. (That year he also began
subscriptions to Sky & Telescope and a glossy new magazine called
Astronomy.)
He bought his first computer in the
summer of 1982. It was a Commodore VIC-20. Eagerly, perhaps even obsessively, he learned
how to program in BASIC.
His second computer (~1984) was a Commodore
64. On it he programmed a neural net
which he trained to run a maze, and then programmed an interactive simulation
of orbital maneuvers around a mini-black hole.
A physics professor at USCA was impressed enough with the simulation
that he asked Stephen to demonstrate it in front of his class. On
this computer, Stephen also learned how to program in Assembly (poorly).
His third computer (1987) was a Tandy
100sx and was his first IBM PC “clone.”
In 1991 Stephen went online for the
first time through a local BBS. He read
Usenet newsgroups; learned how to use Archie, Veronica and Gopher to find files;
and joined a writers group which shared their stories and critiques using email
lists named Writers_L and Novels_L. The members
of this group called themselves “Stud Guppies.”
In his twenty five years of computing, Stephen
has had at least nine computers, two of which were notebooks.