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What is cccp on my computer6/1/2023 But a system for civilians that could influence the economy? That was something else.īut when debated by Communist Party leaders, the finance minister stood up and announced that he was completely opposed to the idea. “It’s worth remembering that the Soviet Union did have functioning computer networks during this whole period – they were military networks,” says Peters. And the challenges were only partly technological. A Russian documentary about Kitov called the “Internet colonel” is available online, with an opening segment that has more than a whiff of James Bond.īut from the moment Kitov sent a letter outlining his proposal to the then Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev, it became clear that getting such a system off the ground was not going to be easy. Kitov had first dreamed of wiring up the USSR back in 1959. But Glushkov had partly been inspired by the work of an earlier network enthusiast, Anatoly Kitov. The Soviet internet was the brainchild of Viktor Glushkov, one of the founders of cybernetics. “A real-time, decentralised, hierarchical computer network for managing all the information flows in the command economy.” But the Soviet project, known as OGAS, was never finished. “We’re talking about internet -1.0,” says Ben Peters, a researcher at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma and author of How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet. It could have rivalled the network sending out tendrils in the US and western Europe at the time – a network that would grow into the internet of today. For decades, a handful of researchers had been urging officials to let them build a computer network, connecting thousands of machines across the USSR.
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