It makes me happy and sentimental to see this post show up on hackernews. I was a contributor to the Ronja project in my teens. Karel (`clock`) taught me so much about open source and truly believed in pushing open technology forward. I was 14 at the time and he just finished university and taught me a ton mostly late at nights on the swiss linux user group's IRC channels.
A lot of the replies point out that cheap PCBs were not readily accessible. Clock and I were both living in Switzerland and prototyping PCBs especially in Switzerland was very costly. This kept us away from developing PCBs for a while.
We did want to build a 100mbit version and that was significantly easier using SMD components and a multilayer PCB so we started working on that. When we had the first prototype I actually took a train to Prague when I was 14 years old and went to a PCB fab to pick up 50 or so along with all the parts. This saved us a few thousand dollars and we tried to recoup the cost by selling kits. Fun times :)
The philosophy of the project was also to build it only with open source projects (something that wasn't feasible for the PCB design - we used Eagle which at least was free to use). The dead bug style worked very well and was extremely simple but of course not aesthetically pleasing when compared to what you can order online today. But it also meant that you could build it yourself without the need to order a PCB.
We have had some success with hiring out of General Assembly. Last summer we hired 3 interns out of GA who each first started off with a simple throwaway project and then proceeded on to some easy tasks learning our stack (Java/Groovy). We're not a ruby/python shop and a lot of our work is backend heavy. This was quite different to what these students were taught. During this period they got an internship salary. Out of the three we were interested in keeping two. The third person couldn't catch on to it fast enough. About a year later they are at about the level of a junior dev out of college. Their development since has been comparable to other junior devs. I count that as a success.
We'd probably do it again at some point but our engineering team is not big enough to absorb too many junior devs and train these. GA helped in building a foundation, we wouldn't have had the resources to do this training on our own.
And no, we were not paying 100k to people right out of the program.
A lot of the replies point out that cheap PCBs were not readily accessible. Clock and I were both living in Switzerland and prototyping PCBs especially in Switzerland was very costly. This kept us away from developing PCBs for a while.
We did want to build a 100mbit version and that was significantly easier using SMD components and a multilayer PCB so we started working on that. When we had the first prototype I actually took a train to Prague when I was 14 years old and went to a PCB fab to pick up 50 or so along with all the parts. This saved us a few thousand dollars and we tried to recoup the cost by selling kits. Fun times :)
The philosophy of the project was also to build it only with open source projects (something that wasn't feasible for the PCB design - we used Eagle which at least was free to use). The dead bug style worked very well and was extremely simple but of course not aesthetically pleasing when compared to what you can order online today. But it also meant that you could build it yourself without the need to order a PCB.
We used a local community run welding shop to build some of steel mounts: http://images.twibright.com/tns/1a52.html