Why the Soviet Internet Failed

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[billtheman]

The more video I watch on the soviet economy the more I realize that the main advantage the US economy had was their willingness to share game changing military technology with their civilian economy. Which created vast synergy and efficiencies and many positive feedback loop. Sharing really is caring and the US culture being able to share development with a wider swath of society really is the secret sauce that won them the cold war.

[AlexthunderGnum]

I was once directly involved in the "OGAS" project close to the end of the entire USSR. The part I was involved in, was called "АСУ Народное Образование" or "OGAS Education". The key problem that was discovered in my time there can be summarized as "garbage in - garbage out" problem. It was very clear that all the people involved in the management were trying to cheat on providing the data entry to achieve some advantage for themselves. One example of that was the total area of the floors and walls specified in the measurements of schools were far too much. Managers wanted to get more supplies, so they were tweaking the data a bit to get by. The same was happening at all levels, I'm afraid.

[cogoid]

Soviets had excellent popular science books on computer-related subjects even in 1950s. But even though those books described in often fairly accurate details how people would use Internet in the future (dial up, search engines, electronic books, machine translation, etc), in reality, even the ordinary telephone network in the USSR remained in a sorry state at least into late 1970s, if not longer -- many people did not have a phone, and switchboard operators were still connecting long-distance calls.

[louisgiokas]

My father worked for an US Army weapons lab. I remember, in my early teens, him telling me that he was able to access computers all over the country. He didn't talk much about work because it was, of course, classified. He did expose me to a lot of the electronics with manuals and parts that were commercial. It was only years later, when I was working on massively networked systems (I actually worked on the GE system you mentioned), that I recalled his comments.

[anjuro]

One rudiment of this endeavor was the network of ЦНТИ (TsNTI) - Centers of Scientific Technical Information scattered across the USSR. As a university student in the 1990s I briefly worked in one of them. By the 1980s they were mainly equipped with IBM clones connected mostly through dialup, rarely with fiber-optic. They had by then lost their economic purpose and basically became imitational bodies, creating fake jobs for the director and "engineer" cronies. By late 1980 and early 1990s they mostly made money by renting out their premises to various computer and electronics shops. By mid 1990s most were gone, their buildings embezzled through various corrupt schemes. But they did in a way contribute to the internet adoption in Russia.

[mzamroni]

It failed because it used cccp/ip instead of tcp/ip

In cccp/ip, client can't own static address.
It must be assigned by dhcccp server

[DeadKoby]

Soviet technology is quite interesting. In the USA, we were always working to create new types of electronics, while the soviets were still making the best out of vacuum tubes and germanium transistors. Today, many technicians are buying Soviet surplus parts to fix their vintage electronics.

[andremarquet]

Interestingly the Chileans did a similar computer controlled central economy during Allende presidency. That was the brainchild of a British computer engineer to run the Chilean copper mines in the 1970s.

[qZbGmYjSQusYqv]

Glushkov was truly a Victor Frankenstein of Soviet science. The elderly Party leadership wasn't interested in OGAS (which frankly was unrealistic) but was very interested in his ideas of transhumanism and reaching immortality through progress in biology and computing. That would be the nice topic to cover.

[greyvilgaxmatter]

Ngl, Anatoly Kitov was really an exceptional character, signified by his hunger for wisdom and knowledge. Bro literally did maths in the battlefield.

[nicholaszonenberg]

Very interesting how many times the idea came up. Was seen as very promising. The goverment realized it would intefer with their personal power and wealth. And then shut it down. An exccellent example of some of the root issues of the USSR

[doncarlodivargas]

1956: one single computer costing 8 billion dollars save our lives
2023: 8 billion computers showing cat videos vasting our lives

[sidviscous]

TCP/IP and the RFCs that standardized its development were the real genius behind DARPANET/ARPANET. Much of this came from research at Stanford and UCB in the 60's. Packet switching led to the development of ethernet systems and the infrastructure we know today. It is fascinating stuff, if a little bit tech-y.

[digitalrex]

As for sources as someone who has a masters in history I really appreciate the research you do and these are some of the better videos that deal with such complex topics and make these videos more watchable than most. Even the best historians are not perfect, we by custom always end our intros with “all errors are my own.” It’s important to be humble in the face of the past. Keep up the good work.

[cameronguilbeau]

God I love this channel. You produce the EXACT conent I'm interested in, never missing. Keep it up

[mattbland]

This totally got me thinking about the possibility of a nearby parallel reality where there's a cybernetic Soviet Union pushing ahead with their own 'Big Red' centralised network to counter the capitalist 'Big Blue'. Their "socialist-network" connects USSR, Soviet Bloc, China, Korea and Vietnam.

[andrewzebic]

You never disappoint mate, keep up the good work! You're one of the few youtubers that always make me come back

[wills]

This reminds me a lot of “We”, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, in the way people hoped technology would allow for the creation of utopia. A great book for anyone interested in revolutionary russia or dystopian fiction in general, especially because it was published in 1924 and written by an actual Bolshevik. Also it’s almost certain that Orwell borrowed heavily from it to write 1984.

[arystanakmolinskii]

Thank you Asianometry, you are one of the few English-language channels that do justice to the old Soviet Union without resorting to tankie apologetics.

[EvDelen]

OGAS sounds very much like Chile's Project Cybersyn, the Salvador Allende era system (some of it computerized) to manage the Chilean economy that actually demonstrated some success until the September 1973 coup that deposed him.