Stories of Grasroots Digital Europe is a decentralized narrative woven through the permanent exhibition What about Software? at the Museum. The exhibition reveals the hidden human side of the history of European computing, where new inventions traveled in suitcases across the Iron Curtain, were carried by persistent cycling across a militarized zone in Ireland, originated in the home workshops of the Eastern Bloc, and crossed numerous other borders via various analog and digital media.

The selection of ten stories—the fruit of collaborative research by the GRADE network for the anthology Silicon Dawn: Histories and Cultures of Creative Computing in Europe (1970–2000) and the online project Media Journeys Across Europe—documents the era of “creative shortcuts.” From Czechoslovak home computers smuggled in chocolate boxes and Romanian “neighborhood LAN networks” built from scrap cables to the unique peacebuilding efforts of the ZaMir network during the Yugoslav wars.