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 used a local community run welding shop to build some of steel mounts: http://images.twibright.com/tns/1a52.html