ePub GIANTS IN THEIR TALL BLACK HATS: Essays on the Iron Brigade (Great Lakes Connections: The Civil War) by From Alan T Nolan in History

Description

How; despite thirty years of effort; Soviet attempts to build a national computer network were undone by socialists who seemed to behave like capitalists.Between 1959 and 1989; Soviet scientists and officials made numerous attempts to network their nation -- to construct a nationwide computer network. None of these attempts succeeded; and the enterprise had been abandoned by the time the Soviet Union fell apart. Meanwhile; ARPANET; the American precursor to the Internet; went online in 1969. Why did the Soviet network; with top-level scientists and patriotic incentives; fail while the American network succeeded? In How Not to Network a Nation; Benjamin Peters reverses the usual cold war dualities and argues that the American ARPANET took shape thanks to well-managed state subsidies and collaborative research environments and the Soviet network projects stumbled because of unregulated competition among self-interested institutions; bureaucrats; and others. The capitalists behaved like socialists while the socialists behaved like capitalists. After examining the midcentury rise of cybernetics; the science of self-governing systems; and the emergence in the Soviet Union of economic cybernetics; Peters complicates this uneasy role reversal while chronicling the various Soviet attempts to build a "unified information network." Drawing on previously unknown archival and historical materials; he focuses on the final; and most ambitious of these projects; the All-State Automated System of Management (OGAS); and its principal promoter; Viktor M. Glushkov. Peters describes the rise and fall of OGAS -- its theoretical and practical reach; its vision of a national economy managed by network; the bureaucratic obstacles it encountered; and the institutional stalemate that killed it. Finally; he considers the implications of the Soviet experience for today's networked world.