Ta'if was still little more than a medieval city when the Saudis took control of it. However, they later embarked on a project of modernizing the city. Saudi Arabia's first public power generator was set up in Ta'if in the late 1940s. In terms of building roads to the isolated city, in 1965 the then King Faisal inaugurated the mountain highway between Mecca and Ta'if, now part of Highway 15 and known as the Taif–al-Hada Road. In 1974, the approximately-650-kilometer Ta'if-Abha–Jizan highway was commissioned part of the Highway 15. By the 1991 Gulf War, Ta'if was such a modern city in terms of communications that it was chosen as the site of the Rendon Group's television and radio network, which was used for communication with Kuwait during the Iraqi occupation.