Technology and Revolution

From Bruce Sterling's famous 1993 report from Prague for Wired Magazine:

On the subject of modems and phone lines, Martin and his '89er friends still talk about "the Japanese guy." Back in '89, Czech students were trying to coordinate the uprising across the nation, and the technical students, including Martin, were running the telecom angle. They used a 300-baud device with the size, shape, and heat of a kitchen toaster. The Czech secret police were far too stupid and primitive to keep up with digital telecommunications, so the student-radical modem network was relatively secure from bugging and taps. Fidonet BBSes were springing up surreptitiously on campuses whenever an activist could sneak a modem past the border guards. Modems were, of course, illegal. Most of the Czech cops, however, had no idea what modems were.

The police were engaged in the hopeless task of beating the population into submission with billy clubs, without the backup of Soviet heavy armor. Martin's independent student movement was smarting from street-beatings and sensed that '89 was '68 upside down. They had a list of seven demands. They were pretty radical demands: three of them were never met. Everyone knew the situation was about to blow. But getting the word out was very difficult.

And then, without any warning or fanfare, some quiet Japanese guy arrived at the university with a valise full of brand-new and unmarked 2400-baud Taiwanese modems. The astounded Czech physics and engineering students never did quite get this gentleman's name. He just deposited the modems with them free of charge, smiled cryptically, and walked off diagonally into the winter smog of Prague, presumably in the direction of the covert-operations wing of the Japanese embassy. They never saw him again.