The Teenagers Who Wired Romania

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In the late 90s, in daring feats of DIY networking on rooftops across Romania’s capital, Bucharest, teenagers are stringing computer cables between tower blocks to share an internet connection. This guerilla infrastructure starts out scrappy, but it sprawls into an impressive, improvised network that catches the attention of telecoms giants. Told by those who built it: Master cabler Roxana Ardelean, DIY network designer Eric Băleanu, and rooftop cable runner Laurențiu Simion. This is the extraordinary story of how a homemade system became the backbone of a city - a reflection of what the internet was meant to be… and what it became. Presenter: Andrada Fiscutean Producer: Tom Bonnett Editors: Ilan Goodman and Martin Smith Archive: Special Assignment: Romania, BBC Radio 4, 05/01/1990 This documentary grew out of a book chapter Andrada Fiscutean co-authored with researchers Alexandra Tătar and Alexandra Bardan: A Web of Cables: The History and Legacy of Grassroots Neighborhood LANs in Romania. It's published in Silicon Dawn: Histories and Cultures of Creative Computing in Europe.