154 Chapter 4
L’viv System or Lviv MICS—an automated control system for streamlining
the industrial processes in the Elektron television factory in L’viv, Ukraine.
After completing the L’viv System, the team engineered a more complicated
Kuntsevo system for planning and managing the resources of the Kuntsevo
radio manufacturing plant in southwest Moscow.^86 The Institute of Cyber-
netics also proposed an industrywide network of ASUs in the industry-rich
Donbass region of Ukraine (figures 4.17 and 4.18).
Not all installations went smoothly. One factory manager, Valentin
Zgursky, senior technologist at a manufacturing plant, admitted that “when
you brought the Universal Control Computer [a mainframe behind the
ASU] to our plan for mass-production,” Malinovsky recalls being told, “I
did everything possible to make sure it would never succeed!”^87 Neverthe-
less, Zgursky eventually saw the value of the ASU and installed it (although
his admission may have been the exception in the long run). Bolstered by
some local successes on the edge of an empire in the late 1960s, Glushkov
also repeatedly reminded anyone who would listen about the work that
even a dozen or so local systems (ASUs) could do after they were connected
into a single national network.
Figure 4.16
Inside an ASU: Machine Hall, State Institute of Computing Centers, unknown date.