The underground story of Cobra, the 1980s’ illicit handmade computer
Mihai Moldovanu grabs the cardboard box with the enthusiasm of a man from the future who’s opening a time capsule. “Maybe it could still work,” he tells me.
He dusts it off with his hands. Inside the box rests the computer he built for himself in high school. He hasn’t switched it on in 10, maybe 20 years. This summer, when moving from one apartment to another, he stumbled upon the box. “I need to find a charger and an old TV set. It’s going to be tricky to revive it.”
An athletic geek now in his mid-40s, Moldovanu has always been crafting DIY projects. In the local open-source community, he is better known as one of the creators of the first Romanian Linux distribution, TFM, that’s still used by local companies. His 9-to-5 job is that of a System Administrator for a fin-tech company in Bucharest.
