How Not to Network a Nation. The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet

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The year 1962 proved to be a tumultuous one for the world. Khrushchev’s grasp on the reigns of the Soviet state began to slip in ...

108 Chapter 4 the vision, the chief visionary (Viktor Glushkov) and his team, and the institutional landscape for the OGAS Proje ...

Staging the OGAS, 1962 to 1969 109 network efficiencies, which were optimized to serve both national and local needs, would achi ...

110 Chapter 4 ...

Staging the OGAS, 1962 to 1969 111 Figure 4.1 Map of the three tiers (I, II, III) of planned computing center sites behind the O ...

112 Chapter 4 As communication scholar Vincent Mosco has recently noted, the Sovi- ets offer perhaps the first glimpse of the mo ...

Staging the OGAS, 1962 to 1969 113 dossiers on foreign scientists, engineers, executives, and companies in the OGAS nationally n ...

114 Chapter 4 The associated costs and scale of such a supercharged system were accordingly colossal. Glushkov captured the sent ...

Staging the OGAS, 1962 to 1969 115 The Visionary behind the Vast Network: Viktor Glushkov Viktor Glushkov (1923–1982), who was c ...

116 Chapter 4 of college in relatively balmy Rostov, preferred the warmer weather in Kiev and he agreed.^10 It is also possible ...

Staging the OGAS, 1962 to 1969 117 am, exercised, breakfasted, went to work, returned home in the evening, and continued working ...

118 Chapter 4 Glushkov modeled his thinking about computer networks and process- ing after—and often against—the prevailing tren ...

Staging the OGAS, 1962 to 1969 119 among others.^15 Optimization modeling, which would have contributed to the management softwa ...

120 Chapter 4 decentralized design of all Soviet national network projects. They were designed to resemble the national economy ...

Staging the OGAS, 1962 to 1969 121 In addition to taking the cybernetic brain-computer analogy to its logical extreme, Glushkov ...

122 Chapter 4 populace. The OGAS sought to pole-vault socialism toward communism at the Hegelian level of historical progress an ...

Staging the OGAS, 1962 to 1969 123 institutional environment could possibly be ready to do all that the OGAS sought to do. Glush ...

124 Chapter 4 computerized socialist utopia, the motherland of the Internet and also pos- sibly the ATM.”^32 I maintain that the ...

Staging the OGAS, 1962 to 1969 125 His wireless currency proposal is a case in point. On Keldysh’s advice, he promptly dropped t ...