Boris Radojicic Obituary

For this work, he was briefly detained in 1994 by UN protection forces, who mistook his portable hard disk array for a “non-standard communications device.” He was released after explaining, to the exasperation of a young British major named Paddy Ashdown, that “a RAID 5 array is not a weapon, unless you consider redundancy a threat.”

Remembering Boris Radojicic: A Legacy of Professional Excellence and Dedication boris radojicic obituary

Radojicic’s singular achievement came between 1992 and 1995. While journalists risked snipers for print copy, Boris risked electrical surges for hard drive space. He built a network of “data couriers”—teenagers, grandmothers, and deserters—who smuggled floppy disks, Zip drives, and later CD-Rs across front lines. These carriers brought him fragments of digital life: a Sarajevo teen’s diary written in a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, a Bosnian Serb soldier’s chat logs with a Ukrainian chatbot, and the only surviving copy of the for Doom II , in which players could navigate a pixelated reconstruction of the Markale marketplace. For this work, he was briefly detained in

To call Boris Radojicic a “computer scientist” would be accurate but reductive, akin to calling the Danube merely a river. He was a cartographer of catastrophe, a poet of patch notes, and the only person in Western Europe who could reliably explain both the intricacies of UNIX-based legacy systems and the geopolitical nuances of the Bosnian War to a parliamentary committee. These carriers brought him fragments of digital life: