EAN: 9780262534666

HOW NOT TO NETWORK A NATION - BENJAMIN PETERS K...

How  despite thirty years of effort  Soviet attempts to build a national computer network were
undone by socialists who seemed to behave like capitalists.Between 1959 and 1989  Soviet
scientists and officials made numerous attempts to network their nation to construct a
nationwide computer network. None of these attempts succeeded  and the enterprise had been
abandoned by the time the Soviet Union fell apart. Meanwhile  ARPANET  the American precursor
to the Internet  went online in 1969. Why did the Soviet network  with top-level scientists and
patriotic incentives  fail while the American network succeeded? In How Not to Network a Nation
Benjamin Peters reverses the usual cold war dualities and argues that the American ARPANET took
shape thanks to well-managed state subsidies and collaborative research environments and the
Soviet network projects stumbled because of unregulated competition among self-interested
institutions  bureaucrats  and others. The capitalists behavedlike socialists while the
socialists behaved like capitalists.After examining the midcentury rise of cybernetics  the
science of self-governing systems  and the emergence in the Soviet Union of economic
cybernetics  Peters complicates this uneasy role reversal while chronicling the various Soviet
attempts to build a unified information network. Drawing on previously unknown archival and
historical materials  he focuses on the final  and most ambitious of these projects  the
All-State Automated System of Management (OGAS)  and its principal promoter  Viktor M.
Glushkov. Peters describes the rise and fall of OGAS its theoretical and practical reach  its
vision of a national economy managed by network  the bureaucratic obstacles it encountered  and
the institutional stalemate that killed it. Finally  he considers the implications of the
Soviet experience for today's networked world.

Aktuelle Preise zur EAN 9780262534666

Produktinformationen zur 9780262534666