Norway's teacher resistance and Ireland's deadly nightclub fire

27:03But first, we have a significant milestone in the evolution of the technology which has resulted in our highly interconnected digital world. In 1991, a small company, led by an Iranian-born engineer called Ruzbe Yassini, created a system which enabled millions of homes across the US to access the internet. Guy Kilty has been hearing how he used the existing cable TV infrastructure to kickstart a digital revolution. The bankers, the cable industry and any investor said, you're crazy, nobody's going to solve those problems. And even if you solve it, nobody cares because who wants to have data connected at their home?

27:44Before he moved to the US to develop the technology that would change the world, Ruzbeth's life began in the Middle East. I was born in Tehran, Iran, which was the capital, a beautiful country with 7 ,000 plus years of the civilization. No country had contributed to the civilization and mankind before 19th century more than Persia in Iran. And Iranian peoples are global citizens of the world who have always contributed to the betterment of the humanity. So I was raised there. I went to school and learned from my parents the integrity of the study heart and be a good person. He may well be a legend in the tech world now, but Roosberg didn't think he'd even work in the industry when he first moved to America.

28:34My interest originally was in medical school, and I wanted to be a medical doctor. So when I came to the United States, I didn't have enough money to go to medical school because they're expensive and cost a lot of money. So I said, I'll go to electrical engineering and biomedical, and through there I jumped back to the medical school. And what happens during my last two years in West Virginia University, I had a number of great professors, and I learned from them that telecommunication, just like medical, has no boundary. It's just as unknown to the mankind as the medical is. And because of their skills and expertise, and because of the number of the projects I had in my junior year and senior year in the university, I changed direction.

29:19instead of going to medical school after I graduated from electrical engineering, I decided to stay with the telecommunication field and pursue my challenge there. And guess what? It's really proven to be just as exciting as medical school would have been. After university, Roosberg worked for a couple of tech firms building his skills. During that time, he learned the key things that would power the technological breakthroughs to come. From 1981 to 1986, I was working for General Electric and I learned how the TV system works, how the cable TV system works, how the audio-video entertainment works.

29:571987 in time frame, I worked for a high-speed data company called Proteon in the data networking. I learned from them how high-speed data works. My vision was that I could put high-speed data over cable infrastructures. Working out how to transfer data using wires connecting homes and buildings was a big challenge in the 1980s, and many assumed a whole new set of wires would be needed. The dream of the technologies was, let's go big, let's do a fiber connection, which is fantastic, it's not a problem, except the cost associated with that. At that time, the United States had about 56 million homes already connected.

30:37So to bring new cable and new labors and new work was extraordinary. To try and get around that cost of installing a whole fiber network, Roosbeau was convinced he could work out a way to use the existing cable TV infrastructure, known as coax cables, to transfer the data both ways. Up to then, the cables had just been used to transfer data to homes in the form of cable TV shows. The hard part would be allowing data to go back the other way. Eventually, Roosberg took his idea to management. I went to the founder of the company I was working with. I said, hey, did you know we really could get these high-speed data networking to every home via COACs?

31:20And his view was that, well, if anybody wanted to do that, they had already done it. And plus, who cares about the homes being connected? Who would ever use computers and the networking from the home? Despite that rejection, Roosberg didn't give up, eventually getting the system up and running at an army base called Rock Island Arsenal. The big challenge remained, though. Could this system work not just in closed networks of government buildings, but across millions of homes in villages, towns and cities? To find out, Roosberg created his own company in 1990 and set his sights on testing out the technology in a real place with real houses.

32:00After a few failed attempts, a small town in Massachusetts called Stowe where a couple of other technology companies were based, seemed open to the idea. We went to the local commercial residential cable company and we told them, hey, we have this crazy idea, we have tested it here and we like to kind of play with your system. The gentleman there was really actually half high techs, half cable guys. I said, sure, I'll give you a channel to play, see how it goes. Things didn't go well to start with. In our first trial, we figured out that cable industry's residential was so noisy that we couldn't even find our signal.

32:40Instead of calling it signal-to-noise ratio, we called it noise-to-signal ratio. It was very horrible. And we failed miserably to be able to get working over residential cable. Over time, things started to improve, until eventually they set up another test to transfer a file from a residential address to a company's office. The file that was transferred each time was a picture of a dove in flight. After resolving all the issues that we had discovered, they initiated the file transfer, and guess what? Everything was flying for them as perfectly as it should with that old residential cables, and they called me enthusiastically with yelling and screaming, saying the dove is flying now over that network infrastructure.

33:28Finally, the technology worked. Roosbe and his team were ecstatic. But instead of trying to make billions from it, he decided to license it to the telecommunications industry royalty-free. You know, everybody asks me that entrepreneurs go make money and then donate a little bit of money here and there to be famous. Why did I do exactly the reverse of that? I come from a country where I noticed that the majority of the problem our country has faced and the area in the Middle East space was since invention of the oil. And I've always been in the mindset that what if we had a telecommuting system that could do health care at the time and educations and all the other good things bring and take its dependency of the oil that not also protect the planet Earth from pollutions that we have, but also provides a freedom for the people in that area that they can enjoy a democratic society and all it brings in.

34:25So for that purpose, I thought donating my technology free without royalties that becomes a global standard was really a cornerstone of my vision at the time, which worked very well. After successfully creating the technology that allowed data transfer between millions of homes, Roosbeck went on to create a mass-market cable modem designed specifically for domestic use. By 1995, his modems accounted for a significant proportion of the market in America. And just a year later, his company was acquired for tens of millions of dollars. Looking back, Roosbert feels immense pride at the technology he and his team created.

35:07This was a dream that created by 13 peoples and seven advisors, 20 of us got together. and we drove our visions to execution and we drove our execution to the useful tools that people could use from their home and it was just a beautiful moment for all of us. Ruzbe Yassini, he was speaking to Guy Kilty. And Ruzbe's inventive ideas on telecommunication lead us nicely into our next item. For this, we're in the late 1990s when the world was on the brink of a revolution that would change the course of modern commerce. With the advances in telecoms, it's possible for a company in any part of the world to outsource back office services to places where labor is less expensive.

35:53In 2019, Rebecca Kesby spoke to a businessman who was one of the first people to spot the opportunity. You know, I wish I could tell you there was a eureka moment. There wasn't. It was quite a simple idea, but it grew in complexity and potential as we thought about it because it seemed so obvious. that it was almost surprising nobody had thought of it earlier.

36:19Pramod Basin had been working abroad in the US and Britain for General Electric for more than 20 years. When, in his mid-40s, he headed home to India, he saw an opportunity to build a new company, and one that would change India's employment market forever. I had the ability, worth, to understand what US businesses wanted, but also the excitement of starting up a new business venture in India. So for me, it was an enormously exciting time, both from a career perspective as well as the joy of coming home and being able to do something new and different. The caliber of people we could attract at that time and now in India was phenomenal.

37:01And the costs at which you could hire people were incredibly low compared to international salaries for the same qualification. Not quite the same qualification, roughly the same qualification. So, you know, you could hire a graduate at that time pretty much for$3 ,000 a year. You could hire a chartered accountant for$14 ,000,$15 ,000. You could hire a master's degree for$5 ,000,$6 ,000. And I could see that they were as good as anybody I'd worked with anywhere in the world. English speaking was another one. Once we advertised and we needed to fill 20 spots, and we got 8 ,000 applications out of which 4 ,000 were totally acceptable, I knew I had an avalanche coming at me.

37:41And literally at that point in time, you realise you were sitting on a gold mine. It didn't hit us till that point in time. The early days of Pramod's pioneering call centre were rather basic. The first call centre experiment was again done in tiny room, 25 feet by 25 feet. barriers made of cardboard between phones, separators made with saris. We didn't have soundproof stuff. We didn't know how to do that. So we brought saris and curtains. And so we went there. It was a shambles. There were wires everywhere, there were saris, there were calls going on, and just starting to experiment.

38:22But appropriate office space wasn't going to be the biggest challenge to overcome. India's notoriously unreliable phone network would be the first major stumbling block. You know in those days we all had three phone lines at home or two phone lines because one was down all the time. So calling my bosses up and telling them how I was going to do all their processing for all their mission critical processes on our phone lines was considerably challenged because the phone line would drop as I would tell them this. And so this used to happen quite a lot. When we went to the telecom authority of course they laughed at us and said are you Are you kidding?

38:57We're going to let you put phone lines so that you can dial people all over the world? Are you trying to set up a phone company? It's not going to happen, right? But outside this building, if you go, is a true landmark of India. It's a giant satellite dish. It was like we had found Nirvana when they put that satellite dish up there. And there's a picture of all of us crowded under that dish. because that was our first private link allowed in India to a private company to dial out. It had a waiting time, so there was a lag. There was a time lag when you talk to people, which was a pain, so we worked hard to reduce that.

39:34We had lots of issues with it, but it was a huge landmark for us. Getting that big satellite dish in place was the start, I think, in some respects, of the entire revolution. Technological problems could be overcome, but the next major challenge would be customer expectation, and that proved to be far harder to satisfy. Whilst all the employees at Pramod's call centre had excellent qualifications and good English, their Indian accents were not so warmly received by customers calling in from the US and Europe. The amount here is$128. Would you like to make a check over the phone? I can post it in the check also.

40:16Yes, they met hostility quite often because either people were saying, where are you calling from? Or sometimes they couldn't understand them. What is this funny accent kind of wondering where the hell this call is coming from? We had accent correction training going on, right? One of the rather bad areas which we didn't excel at was appliances. You know, when appliance owners would call us in with a broken down appliance and our people had never seen a washing machine before. So they're calling them and saying, my washing machine, you know that thing at the back which is leaking away? I'm like, what?

40:51So we triple-checked everything to prove that our quality was excellent. We had double backups on phone lines, on everything possible. You know, because in those days, the risk of error was high. And any problem would have been an India problem, not a problem of the process. It would have been, India won't work, India can't work. Workers were encouraged to study the cultures of the countries they were phoning to familiarise themselves with the football premiership or the National Hockey League to watch the soap operas, even to sound more like the people they were calling. All the trainers seemed to have American accents, so our employees started picking up American accents.

41:29And then as you're talking to Americans all the day, your accent gets more pronounced. So that entire change, that cultural change that was happening, is why I get so terribly excited when I come back to this office, because I could see these young people getting transformed. We were trying to train them in things like the weather in the U.S. If you're calling Arizona, you might as well know whether there's a thunderstorm or snow or ice. You might as well try and get a little more familiar with sports, big events that are happening around that point in time so that you don't, July 4th, you don't call everybody up and not know which day it is.

42:03And then figuring out, you know, what do we call ourselves? If I say, hello, this is Pramod, they don't know who the hell that is. If I say, hello, this is Pete, it's better. While trades unions in Europe questioned the ethics of outsourcing jobs to India, where staff were paid considerably less, worked excruciatingly long hours, often at night, and were even encouraged to change their own names, Pramod argues the call centres did offer great opportunities to their employees and even changed the Indian economy. You know, I think when you're in the throes of it, you don't realise what you've got.

42:36And what we had was a tiger by the tail. I don't think we realized what a huge industry this would become. And even if we did, it was beyond belief to some extent because it's almost beyond what certainly our imagination was at that time. But you know, it's built our cities in many ways. It's built Gurgaon. It's built Hyderabad, Jaipur. Many cities have been built around this industry because these are young kids and you look at them. They have money. They're going to spend it. it gives rise to restaurants, malls, shops, car sales, homes, everything, right, all the stuff. But fast. The biggest element is just what it's done to the people.

43:16You know, 50 % of our employees are women. Men and women working together in a way that doesn't happen in India that much. You know, it was quite liberating, I think, at some level. Economically, very empowering for them. Now, many people can criticize the job, and I think quite rightly. Some of it is very boring. But, you know, it's changed their lives. There are kids here who financed homes, colleges for their relatives. You know, there was an air of excitement and adventure. You look at it every day and say, my God, what did we spawn here? Pramod Basim. In 2011, he left the call center company he founded.

43:54He was speaking to Rebecca Kesby in 2019. Nearly three decades on, India remains one of the world's major call center hubs. Now it's time for this week's Sporting Witness and the story of the most decorated Paralympian of all time. In a career spanning three decades, the swimmer Trisha Zorn-Hudson won a remarkable 55 medals across seven games. She spoke to Matt Pintus in 2024. The 1988 Paralympics have opened in Seoul. Thousands were in the Olympic Stadium to hear the South Korean president welcome disabled competitors from around the world. Seoul, Korea was the first Paralympic Games that we were able to compete in the same venues as the Olympic Games.

44:38That's American Paralympian Trisha Zorn-Hudson. It was monumental because the IPC, International Paralympic Committee, had said that if you were to bid for the Olympic Games, you were to take on the Paralympic Games as well. Tricia is Team USA's star para-athlete. At just 24 years old, she already has 17 swimming gold medals to her name. She's never lost a race, and the winning feeling is something she never tires of. You envision that moment, and when that moment came, it's just like this huge relief of being able to say that you've accomplished your goal that you set out to do and representing your country.

45:27Not everybody can state that. So it's an amazing moment being able to do it for others and yourself pretty special. What made Seoul particularly special to you? It was amazing because we are the same athletes. We train just as hard as Olympic athletes. And from Seoul on to be able to compete in the same venues and everything two weeks after was a huge step for the whole movement of the Paralympic Games. Trisha Zorn-Hudson was born in Orange, Southern California in 1964. She was born with a condition called aniridia, where a person's iris isn't fully developed. In Trisha's case, that meant blindness.

46:16I was the only one in my family that has the genetic eye condition. I did everything that my sibling did. I tried everything. So we spent a lot of time at the beach in the summers. And at the time, my parents were taking me over to a swim club that was starting in the local town. Trisha's promise and talent in the pool was evident from an early age. And at just 16, despite her eye condition, She was on the cusp of qualifying for the Olympic Games. I had always competed with people without disabilities, and so I had just missed the Olympic team by 1-100th in the 200 backstroke. There was a local paper that had done an article, and at that time every state in the United States had an organization for blind athletes, and a director of the California chapter had reached out to me and wanted to know if I would go to their national championships to try and make the Paralympic team.

47:33And make that Paralympic team she did. Tricia made the ultimate splash in the Games in Arnhem, the Netherlands, winning all the events she entered. I had no expectations, so I had no idea about what was going to happen or what I was going to bring home. So when I did get the seven gold medals in my first gaze, I think that set a precedent. I mean, I'm always glad to be setting the bar higher for just on myself, but for others. I was always taught when I was younger, you need to have a level head and be very humble and just let your swimming or whatever you're setting out to do, let that speak for who you are.

48:19Tricia's success continued as she won a further six medals four years later at the 1984 New York Paralympics. But life as a Paralympian wasn't easy. It was far from the glitz and glamour of the Olympics. Every country is different, the way they treat Paralympic athletes and what the support that they give them. And at the time, we were having to pay for our own uniforms. You had to do fundraisers in order to get those expenses for certain parts of a trip. I was fortunate. I was the first here in the United States. I was the first physically disabled athlete to earn a full athletic scholarship to Division I college.

49:05So my college was being paid for because of the scholarship. That alleviated some of the stressors. At the 1988 Games in Seoul, Korea, Trisha continued her winning ways with 10 gold medals. And she set 10 world record times in the process. Her form continued into the next games in Barcelona, where she won even more goals. In fact, she was so dominant that she didn't lose a race for the first 12 years of her career. Tricia decided to try and use her success in Nepal to help lobby for more support for her fellow para-athletes. And ahead of the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, she spearheaded a pilot, allowing Paralympians to live and train in the United States Olympic Training Centre for the first ever time.

49:57It was a massive moment in disability sport, but it didn't come without a few initial teething problems. We went to the pool and they had it as 25 yards. You're training 50 metres. They had lifeguards all over and we're like, what are you doing? We had a coach there and they're like, why is the pool this way? And like, well, we didn't know if they could swim this far. So we just had to laugh. I remember the conversation, too, that they were worried about how we'd go through the cafeteria and what changes they would have to make. And we didn't ask for any changes. We asked just that we'd have the free access to the pool, to the weight room, to all the other facilities that Olympic athletes had.

50:46But that just goes back to my point of training and the whole purpose of education. Tricia went on to compete in seven Paralympic Games across three decades. But just how many medals did she actually win? 41 gold, 9 silver and 5 bronze. And her most memorable medal? Her last one, a bronze in Athens. My mom had passed away in June before the Games. She'd always been to all my Games. I think that was a culmination, knowing that I was going to be retiring after those Games and knowing that this is going to be the end. And I think just not having my mom there and knowing that she would want me to compete at those games.

51:37And it was probably the most memorable event that I did. In 2012, she was inducted into the International Paralympian Hall of Fame. And 20 years on from her retirement, Tricia has mixed emotions about her career. There's a bunch of corporate sponsors of Olympic athletes that Paralympic athletes have now. And yeah, it's bittersweet, but you know what? That was the whole purpose of making the movement and trying to move the needle forward is to be able to have these young athletes who were behind us to be able to have those opportunities. Yes, it was frustrating, but, you know, there is the right time and the right place for things to happen.

52:27And what's happening now is the Paralympics are in a good place. Trisha Zorn-Hudson now works as a legal professional for the Department of Veterans Affairs in the US. She was speaking to Matt Pintus in 2024. Finally this week, we're in the ever fascinating world of the shipwreck. And this is the story of what was considered to be the holy grail of shipwrecks, which was eventually discovered off the coast of Colombia. Treasure on board is thought to be worth an estimated$18 billion. But there's still an international dispute over who owns it. Rachel Naylor has the story of the San Jose. It's September 2011 and Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos is at a reception at the Colombian Embassy in New York.

53:14He's approached by a mysterious white-bearded man. He claims to have found the legendary San Jose shipwreck, which has been famous in Colombia since it sank 300 years ago. He looks a bit like a hippie. I thought he was, oh, another treasure hunter and I didn't want to see him. After all, he's not the first to say he knows where it is. But there's something intriguing about him. So the president reluctantly agrees to speak to him. with a condition that he would not take more than three minutes of my time. He talks very, very fast, and he's very knowledgeable, but a bit strange. He said, I've been searching for the San Jose almost all my life.

54:03This is my passion, this is my life. And I discovered that there is a key called the Admiral's Key near Cartagena. that did not appear in any map that I had previously studied. And if that is true, if that key exists, then I know where the San Jose is. The man making this bold claim is Roger Dooley, a Cuban-American maritime archaeologist. He says he found this antique map in the world's biggest library, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Roger shows the president a copy where four tiny X's mark the spot It sounds too good to be true but why is he telling the president? He cuts to the chase He needs funding as well as the government's permission The president sends him to speak to his culture minister Mariana Gars says who is also dubious but she looks into it and says You know for the first time I think this is serious I think he has very important information and that he is for real.

55:11This is huge news. The San Jose and its booty of gold, silver and emeralds worth billions of dollars had been missing since it sank in 1708.

55:25The Spanish galleon was sailing from Colombia to Spain when a British warship intercepted it and attempted to seize her treasure. But they fired a cannonball into the gunpowder stores by mistake. The San Jose blew up and sank within minutes. More than 300 years later, the president authorises Roger to lead an expedition to find it, with help from the Colombian Navy and American experts who helped discover the Titanic. The search starts in June 2015 in the Baru Peninsula, using a yellow unmanned underwater vehicle shaped like a torpedo. They made an area where it could possibly be, and so they started searching with some submarines.

56:07means they went through half this area and didn't find anything. That is until months later, on the 27th of November, when the president is working in Paris. He gets a phone call to say they found the San Jose. I said, oh my God, I was thrilled. I knew that it was big news. Many of my predecessors had tried. But at the same time, I said, don't get very excited. think about the correct way to proceed. And where was it found? It was found not very far from where the president of Colombia has a small island to go and rest called the Tesoro Island near Cartagena. Tesoro, coincidentally, means treasure.

57:00But the exact coordinates remain a state secret. A week later, the president returns to Colombia and announces the discovery on Twitter, writing, Gran noticia, encontramos el Galeón San José. Well, great news, we found the San José Galeón. The day after, he holds a press conference.

57:22307 years after it was sunk, we have found, without any shadow of a doubt, the San José Galeón. El Galeón San José. I told the world what we had found, and we showed some of the pictures that were taken, which were very clear, very interesting. As a matter of fact, one of the proofs that it was the San Jose was some kind of seal that one of the canyons had. And you could see it in the picture. The news and the images of her bronze guns cast with dolphins make headlines around the world, including on CBS in the U.S. Treasure hunters have called it the holy grail of shipwrecks, and now it's been found.

58:06Colombia says it has located the Spanish galleon San Jose and its cargo, sunken treasure that could be worth billions. Now the Colombian and Spanish governments, as well as a U.S. salvage company, are fighting over who has legal claim to all that loot. The Spanish have always said that these galleons are from Spain. But I started asking around experts and the easiest interpretation of who owns it, the person who finds it, it's his. So that was the position that we took. But not everyone agrees. Not only did the Spanish say it was theirs, some historians said the shipwreck shouldn't be recovered at all.

58:47They argued that the San Jose should be treated like a graveyard as around 600 people drowned when the ship went down. There was a big discussion here in Colombia. Some of them said, no, no, leave it there. It's the only way to preserve it is to not touch it. Which we thought, well, it's a bit illogical. With such a discovery, not to do anything. The president felt so strongly about this, he even passed a law saying as such, the Submerged Patrimony Law, which defines sunken ships in Colombian waters as national heritage. Today, it's not just Colombia and Spain who are fighting over it. A US salvage company claimed they found the San Jose in the 1980s and have launched a lawsuit against Colombia.

59:31Indigenous groups from Bolivia and Peru have also waded in, saying they're entitled to some of the treasure as it was mined by the forced labour of their ancestors. But 11 years and three presidents later, the San Jose remains 600 metres below the surface on the seabed. Last year, despite the ongoing dispute, the first objects were recovered, including a cannon, three coins and a porcelain cup. They are now in a conservation laboratory run by the Colombian government. It's supposed to be the galleon that had the most amount of richness that any galleon has had in the history of the world. So we have said, and I have said, this in fact belongs to humanity and we should recover it.

1:00:17The plan was to build a museum in Cartagena for the people of the world to go and see. How do you feel about it being discovered during your presidency? Now I brag about it. Now I say, well, we discovered the San Jose, but it was, in a way, pure luck. The sense of Roger Dooley appearing and my meeting with him in New York and getting the right people. When I look back and people tell me, well, your legacy, and I say, well, the peace in Colombia, the Nobel Peace Prize, we brought down poverty. But I always say that we discovered the San Jose. I now mention it as an achievement. I do want and I dream of seeing the San Jose recovered.

1:01:12and then I can look back and say that was discovered during my government and that would give me a lot of satisfaction. It would be a good thing for my ego. A life in politics put into perspective by the discovery of a sunken galleon. Juan Manuel Santos was president of Colombia between 2010 and 2018. He was speaking to Rachel Naylor. And that's it for this edition of the History Hour. We'll be opening another chest full of glittering treasures in the form of real-life stories from the past next week. So until then, this is Max Pearson. From all of us here, thanks for listening. Goodbye. Sporting Witness takes you to the events that have shaped the sports world through the eyes of the people who were there.

1:01:55We weren't going to ask permission. We were just going to do it. It was such an amazing feeling. It was incredible. He started to write a story about how he came up with the idea for the red and yellow cars. I got to go. We cried a bit. We laughed a bit. It was wonderful. There's a magic during those moments that carries your soul. We were truly blessed to be a part of history. Sporting Witness. Subscribe wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

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1:02:54Can politicians improve our economic fortunes? Dave Ramsey says no. I'm Tristan Redmond from The Global Story, and I've been speaking to the massively popular U.S. money guru who says if there's a financial crisis, it's on us. When you borrow on credit cards and take out a$1 ,200 car payment on a freaking Range Rover, you've destroyed your life, not the president. For the full interview, listen to The Global Story on bbc.com or wherever you listen.