Staging the OGAS, 1962 to 1969 121
In addition to taking the cybernetic brain-computer analogy to its logical
extreme, Glushkov also sought tight structural analogies in the communica-
tion systems that connected technical and human machines. For example,
he designed the programming language Analytic to resemble human speech:
“We continued to develop it in accordance with the principles of progres-
sively complex machine languages, to get closer to human language.... My
goal was to be able to speak directly with the computer and issue commands
in our language.”^23 Like the relationship between neural, processor, and
national economic networks, Glushkov’s thoughts about scripting together
natural language and computer programming rests on the assumption that
there is nothing particularly natural about natural language and that com-
puting coding (like his other conceptual innovations in macropiping pro-
cessing, automata, and the paperless office) represented an extension of the
calculable artifice already hard at work in human behavior.^24
Each of his innovations sought to reframe and solve knotty local prob-
lems in terms that scaled to a larger global system that contained those
problems and all those like them. In fact central to understanding Glush-
kov’s life and work and his scalable vision for the OGAS is his unflagging
intellectual commitment to what he called “practical universals”—the
merging of mathematics and economics, the theoretical and the applied,
the universal and the particular. He and his colleagues repeatedly insisted
that three principles guided his life work—“the unity of theory and practice,
the unity of distant and near goals, and the decentralization of responsibil-
ity.”^25 He taught others that before putting a principle into action, they had
to formulate it into a general model or rule in abstract mathematical terms
and then test that rule practically, applying it to countless concrete exam-
ples—an imperative to act locally while thinking globally. When higher
authorities handed six of his researchers seven discrete system problems,
Glushkov insisted that the first step was to develop a universal language
for modeling all discrete systems, a language by which they could then
solve all seven problems simultaneously, as well as any more they could be
given.^26 The OGAS in design and implementation followed suit: people at
each step of the network—including factory-based control system, regional
computer center, and national economic planning center—sought to solve
short-term factory problems by developing a universal system for advanc-
ing Soviet socialism toward communism.
The OGAS, for Glushkov, was to be a national communication network,
countless local paperless offices, and a dynamic management system that
connected them—a global-local network. A proper economic reform, in his
mind, must benefit the factory worker, the general secretary, and the whole