[BRIEF NOTE] On Soviet computers
Apr. 15th, 2010 09:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldBruce Sterling did me the service of linking to the text of one Doron Swade's presentation on the Soviet bloc's indigenous computers.
The Soviet computer industry did progress to the point of producing some home computers in the 1980s, but as Swade noted later the computer industries of the Soviet bloc--East Germany's Robotron as a case in point--concentrated efforts on pirating Western technology. If this 1977 Time article can be at all trusted, the Soviet decision to prioritize scientific and military uses of computers over commercial ones helped slow down improvements in computer hardware, while Soviet microchip manufacturing was abysmally behind Western techniques. Slava Gerovitch suggests in a 2008 essay that the desire of different branches of the Soviet government to maintain control over their own information, discouraging the sharing of information between departments in a relatively transparent network, prevented the development of a Soviet equivalent to ARPANET. Thus, when the Cold War ended, so too did most of the Soviet informatics legacy.
Swade's speech goes into more detail, while Wikipedia--as one expects--has a remarkably detail listing of Soviet bloc computers and software. The whole subject fascinates me; possibilities that never came about for whatever reason always do.
In the West, Russian programmers command respect and even awe. One reason advanced for the excellence of Soviet software is that the originality of their algorithms and the efficiency of their code was an enforced compensatory response to inferior hardware.
Others advanced more ominous reasons. Developments in science and technology that offered any prospect of practical application were appropriated and controlled by the state, and abstraction into theory was posited as a refuge from centralised control. The more abstract and theoretical the research the less manifest was its practical value and the greater the immunity from unwelcome controls.
The Soviet computer industry did progress to the point of producing some home computers in the 1980s, but as Swade noted later the computer industries of the Soviet bloc--East Germany's Robotron as a case in point--concentrated efforts on pirating Western technology. If this 1977 Time article can be at all trusted, the Soviet decision to prioritize scientific and military uses of computers over commercial ones helped slow down improvements in computer hardware, while Soviet microchip manufacturing was abysmally behind Western techniques. Slava Gerovitch suggests in a 2008 essay that the desire of different branches of the Soviet government to maintain control over their own information, discouraging the sharing of information between departments in a relatively transparent network, prevented the development of a Soviet equivalent to ARPANET. Thus, when the Cold War ended, so too did most of the Soviet informatics legacy.
Swade's speech goes into more detail, while Wikipedia--as one expects--has a remarkably detail listing of Soviet bloc computers and software. The whole subject fascinates me; possibilities that never came about for whatever reason always do.
