A man with a capital letter
The father of the OGAS project is Soviet cybernetician Viktor Glushkov, one of the main developers of Soviet computers. Glushkov designed both giant computers that filled entire halls and personal computers that could be installed in every Soviet engineer’s apartment. And all this happened in the 60s, when the American IBM was just beginning the path of miniaturization of its systems.
Around the same time, Glushkov began flirting with the concept of the Internet. Of course, in the middle of the last century, no one knew the word “Internet”, but this did not prevent Soviet cybernetics from conducting experiments on transferring information between computers. Glushkov carried out the first such experiment in 1958: using a telegraph communication line, he managed to connect the Kiev computer to the converter shop of the Dneprodzerzhinsk Metallurgical Plant.
This connection was used to remotely automate some production processes at the facility, which was once the largest metallurgical plant in the USSR. Similarly, today, many industrial facilities are managed within the framework of the Internet of Things (IoT).
Although OGAS is often called the pioneer of the Internet, Glushkov’s project was not designed as a consumer service for exchanging messages and accessing interesting information. OGAS was supposed to be the prototype of the internet of things. – a closed computer network in industrial enterprises through which information on the volume of production of anything will circulate.
Transition to cyberspace
A network requires the existence of many nodes. In the context of the Internet, nodes refer to computers. Glushkov proposed creating a three-level OGAS network consisting of many terminals. There is a computer center in Moscow on the first main level. The second are auxiliary centers located in the two hundred largest cities of the country, from Odessa to Khabarovsk. Next – about 20 thousand terminals, that is, computers, scattered throughout important enterprises of the USSR.
Communication between machines had to be two-way, so that the center in Moscow could not only process the received data, but also issue commands to lower-level machines. Moreover, commands had to be given automatically.
So, in a way, OGAS is also a concept of artificial intelligence (AI). After all, this is how many modern AIs work: they find patterns in large amounts of data and, based on them, offer the most effective solutions depending on the task at hand.
This task of OGAS in the USSR was to increase mobility in making economically important decisions regarding quotas and plans. Moreover, these problems had to be solved immediately. Especially against the background of the inactivity of the cumbersome bureaucratic apparatus of the government. OGAS would not only control almost every enterprise in the USSR, but also make it possible to simulate the consequences of making certain decisions.
“The concept of OGAS was to create a unified system for collecting, planning and managing reporting information on the national economy, as well as a knowledge base for modeling various options for the development of the national economy,” said the coordination director. .RU/ Center of Domains socialbites.ca..RF In an interview with Andrey Vorobyov.
Why did OGAS appear?
Glushkov prepared the project on paper and presented it to Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers Alexei Kosygin in 1962. The cybernetics report stated: Implementation of OGAS would cost the country 20 billion rubles, which at that time was equivalent to the sum of the country’s annual budgets for space exploration and defense. Moreover, according to Glushkov’s calculations, OGAS should have paid for itself 15 years after launch.
Application approved.
Glushkov began to create a detailed plan for the creation of OGAS, which must undergo final approval by the government commission. A year later, the commission took place. The OGAS project was subjected to serious criticism and was sent for revision.
First of all, OGAS was criticized for copying the functions of the Central Statistical Office (CSO), a government agency in the USSR that dealt with the collection of economic data and production of statistics. Glushkov did not deny that the CSB stood in the way of his life’s work, but he also saw other reasons. According to the cybernetics expert, the ruling elite did not like OGAS because it would make the work of the Central Statistics Office transparent: where a human statistician could correct the numbers to get a nice report, computers would not cheat.
Western propaganda also began to negatively affect OGAS’ reputation. The United States learned of Glushkov’s grandiose plan and became nervous at the prospect of losing the Cold War because of the momentum such large-scale computing could give to the USSR’s stalled planned economy. Against this background, critical reviews of Glushkov and his OGAS began to appear in the leading media of capitalist countries. For example, the Washington Post published an article titled “Punch Card Rules the Kremlin.” He presented a utopian scenario regarding the deployment of OGAS in which the chairman of the CPSU Central Committee was replaced by computers and officials decided almost nothing. The Guardian presented OGAS as a tool for full surveillance of every citizen of the country and their spending.
Glushkov claimed in his memoirs that both of these articles reached the desks of the USSR’s top brass and frightened them greatly.
And this is easy to believe, because at that time there was a spirit of thaw in the USSR – even party people could listen to the authors of foreign newspapers.
In 1964, Glushkov submitted to the government commission the third edition of the OGAS implementation plan, with changes made taking into account the interests of the Central Statistics Office. However, this situation did not satisfy the economists of that period; They ordered that OGAS be sent for another revision under the supervision of the Central Statistics Office. According to Glushkov, statisticians distorted the idea of the system. But even in its new form it was not destined to come to life – in 1966 the USSR government completely abandoned the idea of u200bu200btransferring economic management tools to the digital environment, citing the high cost of implementation.
alternative history
Andrey Vorobyov from the .RU/.РФ Domain Names Coordination Center believes that OGAS, if operational, could be the basis for creating a public information network. Moreover, Glushkov himself would most likely initiate it, since he already had such a concept in his mind.
“The day is not far away when ordinary books, newspapers and magazines will disappear. In return, each person will carry an “electronic notebook”, which is a combination of a flat screen and a miniature radio transceiver,” quoted Andrei in a conversation with socialbites.ca of the cybernetician, whose last book, “Fundamentals of Paperless Computer Science”, was published in 1982 .
So, it is clear that Glushkov dreamed of pocket computers in the future, which in essence have become smartphones today. Moreover, the Soviet scientist even predicted the mobile Internet through which they would receive information.
“By typing the necessary code on the keyboard of this “notepad”, you can call up any text, images (including dynamic ones) anywhere on our planet from huge networked computer databases, which will only replace modern ones. there are books, magazines and newspapers, as well as modern television,” Glushkov wrote.