[HN Gopher] The Soviet web: the tale of how the USSR almost inve...
___________________________________________________________________
The Soviet web: the tale of how the USSR almost invented the
internet (2017)
Author : tosh
Score : 196 points
Date : 2020-07-29 15:32 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.calvertjournal.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.calvertjournal.com)
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Several years ago a colleague sent me a 60's or 70's soviet film
| exploring the idea of the Turing Test. Does that ring a bell with
| anyone here?
| omazurov wrote:
| Most likely "Who's behind the wall?" [0]
|
| [0] "Kto za stenoi?" (1977)
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECvsD4b0JlU
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| That's it! spasibo...
| trabant00 wrote:
| You can't come up with plan like this and not come up with
| 'what's in it for them' in Russia or Eastern Europe. Not even
| now.
| tropdrop wrote:
| This is not a phenomenon unique to Russia. What was in it for
| the United States to drop 108,000 tons of bombs over Cambodia?
| What is in it still for the US to continue having troops in
| Afghanistan?
|
| Powerful countries have agendas. I cannot think of any entity
| that names itself a "country" that does not.
| nickpp wrote:
| Not the same, and it's plain to see. Russia publicly was (and
| still is) the friend and sustainer of every crackpot
| psychopathic dictator on the planet.
| unmole wrote:
| While US policy was "He might be a bastard but he's our
| bastard."
| bluetomcat wrote:
| Case in point - Bulgaria. Overstaffed state administration
| consisting of more than 400 thousand people spread throughout
| the whole country, for a population of 6.5m. All that staff are
| regular hard voters for the currently ruling party, in exchange
| for promises for pay increases and bonuses. There is also
| strong resistance to introducing any effective electronic
| governance because it might render these people unemployed, and
| that would also compromise the whole power structure.
| truantbuick wrote:
| Isn't this article missing the point of the internet?
|
| It talks about an ambitious (but ultimately aborted) top-down
| project to build thousands of interlinking mainframes.
|
| But building large networks wasn't particularly novel. It was the
| idea that you could build a logical layer that potentially linked
| _any_ network.
|
| The key to the early internet was you didn't necessarily need to
| build anything physical. You could link up several existing
| networks in any which way you want, despite involving disparate
| organizations, systems, and infrastructure.
| emiliobumachar wrote:
| Could you please elaborate?
|
| How would one link up two existing networks with different
| systems and infrastructure?
|
| What I can think of is either installing a couple translating
| routers, which do speak TCP/IP as well as their network's
| internal protocol, or making them, by repurposing existing
| machines with software-only modifications. Is that what you had
| in mind as not really counting as installing something
| physical, or did I miss something?
| thodin wrote:
| Modern "Internet" is about about making everything tcp/ip
| based. Interconnection between networks with different
| protocols was a real thing long before tcp/ip conquered our
| planet:
|
| "An amusing side note on the VNIIPAS connection: while the
| author of this paper was in Havana, he connected to a VAXNMS
| system at his home via the following path: PAD program on
| Unix microcomputer at CENIAI in Havana goes over X.25 board
| local to that system; X.25 line from Havana to Moscow, via
| satellite; VNIIPAS X.25 data switch receives call, routes to
| international Sprint network via Western Europe; Sprint
| carries call through some number of cities and links to
| Reston, Virginia where it conveys call to Columbus, Ohio, to
| CompuServe's X.25 gateway; CompuServe carries call from
| Columbus, Ohio to Tucson, Arizona, where it gets translated
| from X.25 formats to internal DECnet format and passes over
| the University of Arizona DEC net network, through Ethernet,
| fiber optic, 56 Kbps synch and asynch 19.2 Kbps TCP/IP lines
| to author's home over another Ethernet from gateway to
| workstation, returning with the prompt "Username:" The
| miraculous thing about this call is that it was done with a
| single X.121 address at the Havana end." - this is how it was
| in 80s.
| Eyas wrote:
| Right. The key innovation of the internet was the invention
| of TCP/IP for the purpose of inter-network communication. See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite#Early_.
| ..
| ethbro wrote:
| I'd say the kernel of that was the idea of encapsulation
| and separating functions by layer (really the same idea,
| from packet and flow perspectives, respectively).
| aglavine wrote:
| Also, the key to the early internet was the concept of packet-
| switching.
| boudin wrote:
| CYCLADES was really influencial on that
| (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CYCLADES)
| averros wrote:
| Glushkov's story (of OGAS) is a story of a brilliant technologist
| being defeated by his complete failure to understand his own
| ideological blindness. The OGAS project was doomed from the start
| due to economic calculation problem (inherent in any form of
| central planning). So the actual Soviet Internet was built
| decades later by the group of my friends and was instrumental in
| bringing the USSR down.
| UweSchmidt wrote:
| Culturally, the internet is very much an American thing though.
| Any computer network controlled by almost any other culture would
| probably be extremely boring.
|
| The idea of registering a domain and "owning" it at the exclusion
| of everyone else is still wild to me and clearly a parallel to
| staking claims of land by American settlers. The boldness of
| collecting and presenting information in an unique way on a
| website, communities and forums emerging organically, are also
| processes that draw inspiration from a real or idealized past of
| starting from scratch with no authority around. The tolerance of
| occasional security breaches and (initially) rejection of
| centralization and censorship have been labeled the "Wild West"
| before.
|
| A German internet surely would have come with red tape and a mere
| playground area for private citizens, and credentialed entities
| taking over content creation. Communist ideology would have made
| the thing centrally controlled, and judging how tightly
| controlled copying machines and telephones were in Eastern
| Germany as a means of communication nothing of cultural value
| would have come out of a communist internet in my opinion.
| talideon wrote:
| You don't "own" a domain: you have a recurring lease on it.
| quesera wrote:
| True, but this is also precisely the description of land
| ownership on the US, as GP alludes.
|
| Call it "real property tax", or call it "domain registration
| fees" -- if you don't pay up, the item is taken away.
| talideon wrote:
| No, I think you'll find that if you read your registration
| agreement, that is not the case.
|
| I spent about a decade of my life as running the management
| systems of a domain registrar, with all the fun of dealing
| with ICANN, the various gTLD and ccTLD registry operators,
| other registrar, and so on. One of the recurring issues
| that got registrants into trouble repeatedly was the fact
| that they didn't understand that they didn't actually own
| the domain and that the terms of the agreement/contract
| actually mattered.
|
| It's not just a matter of not paying. You're dealing with a
| recurring payment for something with a private entity
| covered by a contract. That is a lease.
| quesera wrote:
| Call it a "lease", or call it a "deed".
|
| If you do not pay recurring fees to the relevant
| administrative body, your operating privileges for the
| asset are taken away.
|
| "Ownership" may be expected to confer more privileges
| than a lease, but that's just a matter of traditional
| terms.
|
| I don't see any meaningful difference.
| macspoofing wrote:
| A domain is a type of intellectual property. For all intents
| and purposes you own it.
| vntok wrote:
| Not necessarily. For it to be a type of intellectual
| property it would have to be unique, distinctive, etc.,
| which many domain names aren't. You can't really bring a
| claim to a domain name outside of trying to prove trademark
| infringement.
| talideon wrote:
| It's not, unless you have a trademark, and even then only
| within narrow domains in which you've registered the
| trademark.
|
| You don't own domains any more than anything else you
| lease.
|
| In fact, if you read your registration agreement, you'll
| find out just how _little_ you own it.
| wwwwewwww wrote:
| "Red Plenty" is a "historical fiction" novel that is an easy read
| and deals with this subject. Glushkov is the main character.
| fivre wrote:
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24945323-the-red-web is a
| nonfiction work on the subject (and a bunch of other related
| stuff) and is excellent.
| cambalache wrote:
| It's extremely anti-soviet, almost propagandistically so. It
| wouldnt be out of place as a work made at the request of Voice
| of America, although the author is an Englishman.
| influx wrote:
| Shocking that a regime in which, "the communist leaders of
| the Soviet Union were responsible for no fewer than 15
| million deaths." could be painted in a bad light. https://en.
| wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_...
| tropdrop wrote:
| To paint a government in a bad light is one thing. To rob
| its citizens of their humanity is another. A bad writer
| thinks they're equivalent.
| unmole wrote:
| Red Plenty absolutely does not rob the Soviet people of
| their humanity. If anything, it emphasis their humanity
| and juxtaposes it against the inhuman absurdities of a
| command economy.
| WC3w6pXxgGd wrote:
| Should the novel be pro-soviet?
| quercusgrisea wrote:
| Do you think it's necessary for a novel to take a strong
| position on the Cold War? Propaganda from an enemy state is
| not a way to get a clear picture of what a place was like.
| talideon wrote:
| The opposite of anti-Soviet isn't necessarily pro-Soviet.
| BrainInAJar wrote:
| Much like the USA, lots of stuff about the USSR was bad.
| Lots was good. Including the political decisions the
| respective countries made.
| nickpp wrote:
| They don't even compare. USSR was the empire (a country
| plus its occupied territories) people literally were
| losing their life trying to get the hell out of.
| cambalache wrote:
| So are those the only 2 options? Why the fondness for a
| dichotomy? Sign of the times I guess.
|
| To expand my comment, the problem is not that it criticizes
| the soviet regime, that is OK and even needed.The big
| problem is the total lack of nuance which robs the work of
| any artistic value. When you read non-fiction and fiction
| soviet authors (Chekhov, Dostoevski, Grossmann, Zhukov,
| Bulgakov) there is always criticism of the government in
| general and the individual in particular, to different
| degrees, but there is also a human side present, this human
| warmness. Yes, the bureaucrats suck and the party
| establishment are bastards, but summer in the dacha is
| fantastic, getting drunk with friends is a brotherly
| experience and there is Masha waiting for me hopefully to
| form a nice family. All of this is mostly absent or totally
| disfigured in western authors treating soviet themes, this
| work one of the worst exponents. The soviet union portrayed
| in Rocky IV and Ivan Drago are more credible and three-
| dimensional than any character in this work. The people are
| only corrupt, incompetent and bad to the core (meany meany
| commies) or helpless victims of the system with 0 agency
| whatsoever. It's painfully obvious the author has not clue
| about the actual psyche of a soviet citizen or functionary.
| tropdrop wrote:
| It sounds like Spufford fails to see the Soviet citizens
| as real humans.
|
| For an example how to _not_ do that, all one must do is
| read any of the authors you mention (or Tolstoy,
| Chukovskaya, Gogol...) Tolstoy in particular has a knack
| for painting the interior psychological worlds of his
| characters fluidly and from a place of deep empathy.
| unmole wrote:
| That is definitely not the impression I got from reading
| the book. I can mostly only recall accounts of ordinary
| people trying to make the best of the absurd situations
| they faced.
| drran wrote:
| It's good that it antisoviet, isn't? Soviet Union was
| responsible for millions of deaths. In Soviet Union, you will
| be prosecuted as American spy just because you have account
| on HN.
| phenkdo wrote:
| A comparable precursor to the internet was MINITEL in France.
| macintux wrote:
| The Internet predates MINITEL, at least if you consider ARPANET
| its birth.
| jonmartinwest wrote:
| Two pre-ARPANET prototypes were "oN-Line System" and Memex.
|
| Douglas Engelbart's "Mother of all Demos" still blows my mind
| every time I watch it. Douglas Engelbart was inspired by
| Vannevar Bush "Memex.
| nahuel0x wrote:
| Soviet bureaucracy wanted to transform itself into capitalist
| oligarchs by seizing and privatizing the state enterprises
| instead of creating an open, democratic and scientific economic
| planning system. Trotsky was right.
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _Soviet bureaucracy wanted to transform_
|
| Quite the opposite: soviet bureaucracy didn't want to transform
| anything, they were more concerned with maintaining the status
| quo for as long as they could. This is why the system turned
| out to be too rigid to withstand the pressures of the modern
| world.
|
| On the other hand, think about how much the planned economy
| would benefit from the wide-spread automation and access to
| modern computing and communications.
| smsm42 wrote:
| If socialism and planned economy could ever work, massive
| automation, networking and computerization would be the way
| to do it, otherwise planning is plain impossible, especially
| on humongous scales USSR has to deal with. It seems to be the
| case that it can't work even then, the inherent deficiencies
| in the system are just too fundamental for the automation to
| fix, but it was certainly a valiant attempt and thinking to
| the right direction. Just not enough, because it never could
| be enough. Just as if you want to go to the moon, jumping is
| going the right general direction, just would never be
| enough.
| mantas wrote:
| What would planned economy do with hands not needed anymore?
| :) Even with totally unproductive economy, USSR had lots and
| lots of bullshit jobs just to keep people employed. What
| would USSR do with tons of unemployed people? Create fake
| jobs? Or what... let people find out what they'd like to do
| and let them start private initiatives?!?
| Koshkin wrote:
| No problem there: an efficient planned economy would have
| no trouble whatsoever also planning for bullshit jobs,
| efficiently.
|
| Incidentally, does not look like bullshit jobs were
| specific to the USSR, they are indeed _everywhere_.
| Shivetya wrote:
| the issue has always been that there are far more people
| than you expect who wish to only consume hence why these
| states only worked for as long as they did because
| authoritarian governments have little in the way of
| limits when it comes to compelling people to work.
|
| you would need an excessive abundance to accommodate the
| large numbers of people who do not believe they must
| contribute. I am not saying they won't work and produce
| wealth, those that do will only do so for themselves
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Let me know when you find an efficent planned economy. It
| certainly couldn't occur under all of the communist
| economically illiterate assumptions of a universal fair
| price as an implication of their labor based value
| fallacy. Treating dynamic supply-demand feedback as fixed
| moral imperatives is a reciepe for disaster. It seems
| that fixed assumptions of "always right" is the surest
| path to insanity and travesties.
|
| Snark tangent aside, the issue with the USSR wasn't so
| much the bullshit jobs as the squandering of the labor of
| those performing actually important jobs via lack of
| support. They took labor for granted as a free input and
| neglected efficiency, exactly like slave owners and
| feudal lords they accused capitalists of being.
| chupasaurus wrote:
| Incidentally, any amount of both plans and bullshit jobs
| in USSR hadn't produced enough goods to supply the food
| deficit. There could be no efficiency in a system
| developed by parties with personal interest.
| ulzeraj wrote:
| I fail to see how magic advanced computer power would
| solve the problem of economic calculation in the
| socialist commonwealth. Without prices there is no
| efficient distribution of resources.
| thrownagain wrote:
| The same way they do so within a single sufficiently
| large corporation, and the same way the market utterly
| fails in such a situation. See
| https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4385-failing-to-plan-
| how-ay...
| thodin wrote:
| Private companies are interested in getting real
| statistics, it was not like that in USSR. Even on largest
| auto-factory (AvtoVAZ) programmers were creating software
| with intentional bugs, so they can fix it later, during
| pre-programmed outages and get some bonuses. No one was
| interested in sending real statistics to Moscow, from
| head of local shop to head of large factory.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| To be fair to those programmers, I've seen the same thing
| (or similar) in the US. It wasn't intentional bugs, but
| intentional delays in addressing them. That is, they
| sandbagged. They knew the fixes but didn't apply them so
| that they could hit monthly/quarterly/whatever targets.
| Or they knew they could knock out 100 features in a week,
| but that one feature would take 3 months. They'd mete out
| those 100 easy features over the three months so that
| they didn't appear stalled (they weren't, but management
| couldn't tell the difference between a stall and a hard
| problem).
| thodin wrote:
| Ok, another example: out famous "Cotton Scandal":
| http://shorturl.at/fzLPU
|
| For more than 10 years thousands of party members from
| soviet republic of Uzbekistan were sending fake data to
| Moscow (this included corruption on many levels across
| the country) about production of cotton. Everyone was
| involved, from top to bottom, I don't see how creation of
| any network would help with that. In fact programmers
| across USSR were putting tools into the software for
| state companies to produce "fixed" results for central
| planning committee. And in central planning committee
| they were also corrupt :) (my relative worked there in
| 80s and I know how it was organized on basic level).
| alentist wrote:
| What makes you think central planning within a single
| corporation is comparable to central planning for an
| entire society?
|
| I recommend reading about the theory of the firm to
| understand why they emerge and what makes them efficient.
| andi999 wrote:
| I read a while ago that in communist society there is
| usually a shortage of everything including labor (that also
| why females were encouraged to work soon after giving
| birth)
| thodin wrote:
| USSR invited a lot of Vietnamese and North Korean workers
| because of this problem.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| Nope, women were given a generous 3 years off work after
| birth. In general since all work was equally paid (sort
| of) and you could just choose your profession, it's
| possibly harder, more dangerous jobs had issues with
| filling up positions and you couldn't solve it in a
| capitalistic way of just paying more (or increasing
| immigration for cheap, slave labour). Too many people
| wanted to be writers, artists, etc.. and since there was
| no invisible hand of the market to force them into more
| needed profession the labour market was broken.
| thodin wrote:
| Not actually 3 years: 1,5 years since 1982 and 112 days
| before that. And if you stay at home you'll get only 30
| rubles per month, it was a very problematic financial
| situation for many families. 3 years (1,5 years with
| payment and 1,5 years without) came only in 1989, when
| you had to spend many hours in long queues to buy
| anything for your child.
| wcarss wrote:
| Self-directed initiatives need not be private -- that isn't
| some kind of big gotcha there, see for example: all open
| source work.
| nahuel0x wrote:
| The bureaucracy wanted to maintain the status quo (and his
| privileged position in it) but in the long run their interest
| as a caste were directed to restore capitalism, as they sat
| on a contradictory position (e.g., no inheritance rights).
| There was a big Trotsky-Burnham debate in late 1930's about
| this. The common idea of the soviet bureaucracy wanting only
| to keep the status quo made many in all sides of the
| ideological spectrum to be surprised by the USSR fast turn to
| capitalism.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Cybersyn, then
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?q=cybersyn
| gumby wrote:
| A similar system was planned for Chile until the CIA overthrew
| their government in 1973. Allende was really far sighted and
| imaginative.
| Niccizero wrote:
| It wasn't our goverment. Allende won by parlamentary tricks
| (not by popular vote) and had very poor support during the
| entirety of his govement.
| ZinniaZirconium wrote:
| It would have been so cool if the USSR had its own internet and
| shared it with China and China were still running it now because
| wouldn't it be great to stop hearing about how people think
| firewalling the entire Chinese IP space will keep hackers out.
| Also a parallel internet built on something other than TCP/IP
| would promote competition to see which internet design is
| technically superior. But realistically nobody wants two
| internets that are incompatible. We already have IPv6 which is
| incompatible with the rest of the internet and that's enough
| trouble as it is.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Every now and then I run across a site still serving X-Clacks-
| Overhead.
| enkid wrote:
| They would just have gateways that translated between the two
| protocols. Think changeover in railway gauges. Realistically,
| one would become the standard and swamp everything else. Look
| at how slow IPv6 adoption has been.
| gen220 wrote:
| Poetically, this universe you've created reminds me of the
| story of the Berlin metro during the Cold War.
|
| Prior to the division of the city, the metro system spanned the
| whole city, and was rebuilt to functioning capacity in the
| aftermath of WW II. Once it became necessary to construct a
| controlled border between the NATO and Soviet sectors, they
| eventually erected barriers on the tracks; creating two
| disconnected transportation graphs.
|
| Except! There were some lines that began and ended in "West
| Berlin", but needed to pass through a couple of stations in
| "East Berlin;" these were allowed to continue operating, but
| the train conductors were not permitted to stop at the "Easte
| Berlin" stations under any circumstances. The Geisterbahnhofe
| (ghost stations) were patrolled by armed guards. This system
| persisted from the early 1960s until 1989.
|
| Both sides made improvements to their respective pieces of the
| U-bahn, to service the local populations. But they never made
| any changes that would make a reunion impossible (for example,
| changing the track widths, or signalling technology). When the
| wall came down, the system united into a fully-functional whole
| remarkably quickly.
|
| Imagine if the internet partitioned between "east" and "west";
| but, in order for the internet backbone to reach India for
| example, it would first need to pass through Russia or China. I
| wonder if something similar would happen!
|
| Editorializing, it's fascinating to see how these systems, that
| are designed to (more or less indiscriminately) connect people,
| behave when they are suddenly coerced to instead keep people
| apart in unnatural ways. It never seems sustainable, and the
| separation seems to revert so easily once the coercion is
| lifted. It's kind of a hopeful story for humanity, I think.
| xxpor wrote:
| Were the armed guards there to keep the western trains from
| stopping or for keeping easterners from escaping via the
| tunnels?
| toyg wrote:
| Don't forget keeping spies at bay. Berlin was a notorious
| hotbed of espionage, for obvious reasons, and East German
| authorities had already enough trouble controlling the
| existing checkpoints without having to add new ones.
| [deleted]
| gen220 wrote:
| I think this is one of those cases where the most correct
| answer is simply "yes".
|
| Realistically, the guards were put there to halt the
| transfer of people, goods, and currency: to be the physical
| manifestation of a hard border. Although, the _motivation_
| for this border (who it benefits, is it to keep "others"
| out vs "us" in) was a dynamic concept that evolved over
| time.
|
| However, if you integrate the motivation function over the
| entire time of separation, which is one way of reducing the
| complexity, the primary result is to keep easterners from
| escaping. In the early days of widening division, there was
| a mass migration of people fleeing "The East"; each person
| carried a multitude of reasons for their flight. One effect
| of the border was to halt this flow.
|
| There were easterners who sincerely viewed this
| differently, and wanted to keep westerners out (especially
| the "spies"!); however, their perspectives were definitely
| a minority, and don't survive the integral.
| jandrese wrote:
| The thing that really drove this home for me was the way
| the wall was built literally overnight with no warning to
| the public to prevent people from fleeing.
| gen220 wrote:
| This fact, that "the wall was built literally overnight",
| also reflects how ad-hoc and dramatic the decision to
| raise the wall actually was. At the time, people had no
| idea how "real" the newborn borders were going to be,
| because something like that had literally never happened
| before, there was no precedent.
|
| If you're interested in the topic of the east/west German
| border's materialization over time, I'd recommend you to
| Edith Sheffer's excellent book on the subject [0]. It
| focuses on adjacent villages in Thuringia, and how they
| took turns coping with, helping create, and profiting
| from the existence of the border.
|
| It's a great illustration of Simpson's paradox [1]:
| something that looks kind of simple on the surface (of
| course there would be a border between NATO and Warsaw
| Pact), becomes more complicated when you glance at the
| details (the people living on either side were mostly
| German citizens, with ideas and ambitions and fulfilling
| lives).
|
| Then, you zoom in on the details (individual people,
| families, towns, neighborhoods), and again you're
| presented with something comprehensible. For example, a
| mayor can get special funding from the Marshall Plan, by
| emphasizing the propaganda opportunity of building
| attractions near the border; to get this money, it's
| helpful to _sell_ the idea of a fundamental difference
| between east and west; once the attractions are built,
| there is now a _real_ difference between east and west,
| whereas before it was imaginary. When you zoom out, it 's
| these little independent assertions of autonomy and
| appeals to authority that motivate the creation of a
| border. Super fascinating stuff.
|
| [0]: https://www.amazon.com/Burned-Bridge-East-Germans-
| Curtain/dp...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox
| smsm42 wrote:
| Having used early Soviet computers - before they gave up on
| trying to design anything and just copied or used Western
| schemes - I can say the USSR internet would definitely be
| different but there's no way the design would be technically
| superior but for some improbable accident.
| nradov wrote:
| We had other protocols. TCP/IP won exactly because it was
| technically superior.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_Wars
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Somewhat related, Netheads vs. Bellheads
| https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/
|
| I briefly worked at a place fully dominated by Bellheads
| early in my career. They were bemoaning IP and holding on to
| ATM stuff as late as 2001. I'm told that the last of their
| tribe (after I left) fought off VoIP as a passing fad well
| into the 2000s.
| mherdeg wrote:
| Hard to believe this was nearly a quarter century ago. T he
| references are getting dated:
|
| > "How do you scare a Bellhead?" he begins. "First, show
| them something like RealAudio or IPhone. Then tell them
| that right now performance is bandwidth-limited, but that
| additional infrastructure is being deployed." > ... > One
| result is undergrads who, for $29.95 a month, clog up the
| Internet with CU-SeeMe sessions.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| The article is dated 1996. How does it have an IPhone
| reference?
| pkaye wrote:
| Its crazy to think that the iPhone only came out in the
| great recession in 2007. Seems like we had it forever.
| tudorw wrote:
| We not being me, brandishing my Psion gold card as
| evidence of my first adopter enthusiasm...
| nwallin wrote:
| Wrong iPhone.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_iPhone
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| Thanks. That's closer, but the time to release is still 2
| years. Is the article referencing pre-release rumors? Or
| was it amended later?
| thodin wrote:
| Probably it was about this product:
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/hey-look-heres-an-iphone-
| ad-fr...
| gnu8 wrote:
| The apparently out of place reference to the iPhone in
| this article from 1996 is actually referring to the
| IPhone, one of the first internet appliances.
| EricE wrote:
| ATM. The horrors of working at a Navy installation that was
| trying to get ATM to the desktop (!) to work.
|
| Fun times.
| simonjgreen wrote:
| ATM is still actively in use in broadband networks all over
| the place. Its a real pain when you're on the ISP side.
| topranks wrote:
| Only with ADSL right?
|
| It's gone in newer DSL variants and not in DOCSIS? Or am
| I wrong?
| guenthert wrote:
| It might very well be a pain for the admins, but for low
| latency applications, ATM has clear advantages to the
| user.
| topranks wrote:
| That explains its massive success I suppose?
| ZinniaZirconium wrote:
| Is IPv6 winning yet??
| ben509 wrote:
| It's hit 35%, and has broken 40% in many countries:
| https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
|
| IPv4 will probably never go away because it's a better
| choice for private networks.
| xxpor wrote:
| Depends what you're looking at, on mobile it absolutely is.
| Not sure what the situation around the world is but in the
| US pretty much all LTE connectivity is via v6. T-Mobile at
| least doesn't even dual stack, if you need to go somewhere
| that's v4 only they do NAT64
| xorcist wrote:
| No, it won because it could be carried over all other
| protocols. It had a simple design and real world use cases
| too, which helped. A classic example of "worse is better".
| enkid wrote:
| Wouldn't real world use cases be a technical advantage?
| cafard wrote:
| Thanks. I haven't thought of X.25 in 25 years.
| non-entity wrote:
| Heh I'm currently working on a toy X.25 stack
| implementation as a side project
| thodin wrote:
| github link, please? :)
| [deleted]
| gumby wrote:
| Props to the author for using the definite article with the
| ARPANET. I usually see it strangely written as "Arpanet" as if it
| were a thing that had a name. It was just the net, just as the
| local big town is referred to as "the city" wherever you happen
| to live.
| jandrese wrote:
| IMHO the project was doomed from the start. Top down design on a
| scale that massive and distributed is nightmarishly complex, and
| when the designer is well ahead of the state of the art like this
| it doesn't stand a chance.
|
| ARPANET by contrast started from the bottom and worked up. This
| is crucial because it makes it easy to iterate on the design
| until you get it right. With a top down design mistakes get baked
| in and become nearly impossible to correct.
| zackmorris wrote:
| It's interesting to hear you say that. When I was growing up in
| the 1980s, everything was top-down (NASA, IBM, even pop
| culture). '95-99 was when the internet popularized the idea of
| barely controlled anarchy leading to success that we take for
| granted today.
|
| On a tangent, I personally feel that bottom-up design has been
| an almost complete failure. The US has lost its ability to
| articulate what it needs to do, and then execute that plan. So
| for example, nearly all federal services that we used to depend
| on are failing. The Post Office is being crippled because it's
| seen as a price ceiling against UPS and FedEx, not to mention
| that elections can't be rigged when votes are centrally
| counted. The IRS has been defunded by the far right and
| liberals who have sold out to Wall Street, because they don't
| want rich people or corporations to be audited, because that
| might reveal widespread fraud. NASA hasn't been properly funded
| since Challenger, and technically lost its funding when the
| public lost interest in moon missions. We can argue various
| fake news interpretations of these trends, but the truth of
| them is self-evident from an academic standpoint.
|
| What's my point? That maybe we could use a little more top-down
| planning. I'd rather see the spirit of socialism succeed (the
| elimination of wealth inequality), rather than what we have
| now, which is survival of the fittest on steroids. A top-down
| internet might have had some basic security measures in place,
| such as HTTPS everywhere. Also some bells and whistles like the
| free hosting that university students enjoy.
|
| This may all seem quaint, but the loss of confidence in central
| government planning in the US is another way of saying that our
| republic is in decline. It's the central conflict in the
| Republican Party, half of whose members are old enough to
| remember when American ingenuity was once second to none. Now
| we can't even temporarily nationalize, say, N95 mask
| manufacturing. Sad.
| winstonewert wrote:
| > not to mention that elections can't be rigged when votes
| are centrally counted
|
| What?
| tus88 wrote:
| Sounds like something else the USSR attempted :D
| thodin wrote:
| USSR invented "internet" in terms of internal military network,
| but it had nothing in common with public packet-switching
| networks like in the West. Such networks were build in USSR only
| in late 80s - early 90s, some of them by western companies.
|
| Even PSTN was unreliable, mostly analogue, SS7 was never
| implemented on 99% of intercity links.
|
| Glushkov never produced any working model of his "network", they
| had no protocols, no software, no hardware.
| wwarner wrote:
| I think this is interesting. The value of tcp/ip was the
| ability to form logical networks over and across existing
| physical/electronic networks. That only makes sense if you have
| an abundance of physical networks to start with.
| thodin wrote:
| Glushkov was never about packet switching, he had an idea to
| build new dedicated physical network for this project, he
| estimated that this project will need more resources than
| nuclear and space program combined (!). It was actually a
| waste of materials, resources and completely incompetent. And
| access to that network was planned as very secure, even the
| project itself was partly top secret.
|
| In real world, we in USSR had very basic X.25 network (built
| by VNIIPAS - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VNIIPAS) in late
| 80s, with 2 links to Europe (via Finland and Austria) and
| X.25 network for universities (Akademset). They were many
| years behind even European networks and were built on very
| unreliable hardware. TCP/IP came to Russia only after 1991,
| no one actually used it before even for LANs (although it was
| available in stolen source code from BSD Unix).
| xorcist wrote:
| They almost invented a network, not the internetwork.
|
| Important difference.
| decebalus1 wrote:
| Fascinating stuff. If you're interested in this, you'll love 'How
| Not to Network a Nation' by Benjamin Peters [0].
|
| [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27310479-how-not-to-
| netw...
| anarbadalov wrote:
| Agreed! (full disclosure: i work for MIT Press). Here's a
| 3,000-word version of the book that readers of this piece will
| also appreciate: https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-soviets-
| invented-the-internet...
| leptoniscool wrote:
| It really doesn't matter which group of people or what state
| "invented" the internet. Humanity is better off now with it. It's
| also incorrect to assign all credits to the origin, since it
| involves all the people who have worked to improve it
| incrementally.
| macintux wrote:
| Except that its origins in the U.S. have had fairly significant
| knock-on effects like the dominance of English online. The
| perceived censorship-free nature, receding as it may be,
| perhaps can be attributed to its origins in a country with a
| constitutional prohibition thereof.
|
| Unfortunately it's not so clear humanity is unambiguously
| better off with it. Social media is certainly stress-testing
| society.
| kome wrote:
| Unrelated, but fun: the .su (soviet union) domain is still active
| and running.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.su http://www.fid.su/
| chupasaurus wrote:
| Unfun part is that the administrator of the zone (which is
| ROSNIIROS not the FID) is being overtaken by the government.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| I'm fond of the site hosting http://diafilmy.su/7209-sojuz-
| appolon.html among others (use arrow keys to advance the
| filmstrip).
| Baeocystin wrote:
| As a space fan, what a great filmstrip! Thanks for posting it
| for us to see.
| tvalentyn wrote:
| There is a good book covering the development of computing in
| Kyiv written by a contemporary of Glushkov: intro:
| http://www.icfcst.kiev.ua/MUSEUM/DIFFERENT/StoreEternally.ht...
| pdf:
| http://www.icfcst.kiev.ua/MUSEUM/TXT/MalinovskiyBN_StoreEter...
|
| See also: http://www.icfcst.kiev.ua/MUSEUM/museum-map.html
| myth_drannon wrote:
| So a bit like a capitalist entrepreneur who needs to have a
| brilliant idea and be a great salesman, the scientists in USSR
| had to have a cunning social skills to push their ideas through
| layers of un-interested bureaucracy. A Sisyphian task that would
| just cause them to become disengaged. That's how that society got
| its alcoholics, poetry evenings and other sublimation hobbies.
| icefo wrote:
| The article made me think that the guy who rejected the
| proposition rejected it because it would have lessened the
| importance of his ministry as most of the job within could have
| been automated if the project turned out to be successful.
|
| I'd also say that great social skills are just as important
| today. Society is not meritocratic, you can have best idea, the
| best solution to a problem if you can't sell it or react
| appropriately to criticism (even to you coworkers) you're going
| to be frustrated. I'd that sometimes include being "cunning" if
| the person you're talking to is not being honest you don't have
| to be either.
| vidarh wrote:
| One of my pet theories is that economic growth is surprisingly
| poorly correlated to economic or social systems except for one
| thing: Stability.
|
| Bring stability, and people learn the mechanisms that works for
| their society, and overcome surprisingly large differences in
| type of obstacles. Be it dealing with the vagaries of the free
| market, or how to maneuver a Soviet-style bureaucracy.
|
| It's in fact almost depressing how little effect even quiet
| massive political changes appears to have on growth on "just"
| national level relative to the effects of larger global trends;
| but an alternative view is that it shows humans abilities to
| work around messed up political limitations.
| TimPC wrote:
| I think your oversimplifying here. I think economic growth is
| strongly tied to stability but it's also strongly tied to
| mechanisms. Pricing as a vehicle for measuring supply and
| demand simply outstrips everything else we've tried. Even
| this article mentions how difficult it is to centrally plan
| supply and demand and how large the bureaucracy needs to be.
| Perhaps some technocratic socialism could create a
| computerized bureaucracy large enough to solve this problem
| somewhat well, but I still think computer models are going to
| be inferior to actual markets. While markets do have plenty
| of imperfections they are kind of like democracy, the worst
| system for supply and demand except for all the other ones.
| As for why having good systems of supply and demand affects
| innovation dramatically the short answer is that it forces
| innovation to conform to an approximation of useful (creating
| demand) rather than just novel (which is what happens in a
| lot of purely academic projects). Non-capitalist systems have
| also done poorly at creating competition and competition
| seems to be a central force in generating quality (in fact
| the biggest failure mode of capitalism seems to be anti-
| competitive monopolies).
| tehjoker wrote:
| Markets are democracy for the rich. They are only
| democratic when everyone has roughly equal purchasing
| power, a condition which is nearly immediately undone by a
| market. The whole idea that founded the Soviet Union is
| that markets are deeply undemocratic and they were trying
| something different. You can criticize their attempt, but
| it's important to at least understand that.
| vidarh wrote:
| Of course I'm oversimplifying, but there are plenty of
| examples.
|
| E.g. compare the UK and France over the last 20 years, and
| try to spot when France cut working hours.
|
| Or look at China under Mao, with the frequent political
| changes, vs. under Deng. It's tempting to think the growth
| under Deng happened because of his economic reforms, but
| the growth started _before_ the reforms. Just like growth
| started every time things settled down under Mao too, only
| to be severely disrupted again and again.
|
| Look at Africa, and match GDP growth against peace vs. war
| in different countries.
|
| Also, I did not speak about innovation. I spoke
| specifically about economic growth. Economic growth is
| affected by innovation, but it can go very far with little
| innovation.
|
| [EDIT: Also to your mention of 'technocratic socialism' vs'
| markets, the two are not contradictory; many socialist
| ideologies favour markets as the primary resource
| allocation mechanism over planning]
| jbay808 wrote:
| North Korea seems like a pretty stable country that
| hasn't seen much economic growth. On the other hand, they
| are perhaps the very poorest of stable countries, and
| still wealthier than some less stable countries like the
| Congo.
|
| I also suspect that rather being merely inefficient,
| their leadership might be actively opposed to economic
| growth and could be suppressing it deliberately to keep
| their population poor and hungry.
| smsm42 wrote:
| The 70s and early 80s is the USSR were universally regarded
| as the period of stability. So much stability that the
| official name of the period is "stagnation":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Era_of_Stagnation
|
| This era ended by the USSR assuming the most stable position
| possible, i.e. dead. So I wouldn't over-promote the value of
| "stability" as such. Being stable is good if you're in a good
| place, otherwise it's deadly.
| vidarh wrote:
| GDP per capita in the Soviet Union continued growing until
| the end with a couple of minor drops - the collapse in
| Russian GDP per capita first accelerated with the collapse
| of the Soviet Union.
|
| The 70s and 80s provided slower growth, sure, but still
| growth. As far as I can tell there was no drastic decline
| in GDP per capita growth for the Soviet Union until towards
| the very end of that period, when the rapid changes from
| Brezhnev to Andropov, to Chernenko, to Gorbachev disrupted
| the already weak growth.
|
| It's not that I'm suggesting everything will grow the same
| irrespective of regime or system, but that the correlations
| are much weaker than most people will assume.
| smsm42 wrote:
| > to Gorbachev disrupted the already weak growth.
|
| "Disrupted" is a bad word to use here, it's like saying a
| surgeon "disrupted" a body of a dying patient. Gorbachev
| had no choice - the Soviet economics was dying. There are
| many books and doctoral theses written by now about how
| exactly and why it happened, but what you describe as
| "slower but still growth" was the process of slow
| economic collapse. Nothing worked properly by the time he
| took over, basically. He tried to deliver some CPR and
| defibrillation by introducing sort of NEP 2.0 (hey, it
| worked for Lenin!), and "acceleration", and "perestroyka"
| - but it was way too late. By then, the collapse was
| inevitable.
|
| And it's not like the top Party functionaries didn't know
| that - they were aware of it in the early 80s (in 1984
| they started introducing kinda sorta markets between
| state enterprises - see Khozraschyot) and by the late 80s
| they were in panic - that's why Gorbachev had to
| "disrupt". Because they had to do something to try and
| save the collapsing economy. Unfortunately for them it
| was impossible.
| keiferski wrote:
| "In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had
| warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced
| Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In
| Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred
| years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The
| cuckoo clock."
|
| - Orson Welles, The Third Man, 1949
|
| Ancient Greece was also exceptionally politically unstable
| and yet produced the foundations of Western civilization.
| mristin wrote:
| Switzerland faced similar warfare, terror, murder and
| bloodshed -- it's only in 1848 that Switzerland came to
| peace.
| aglavine wrote:
| You now Orson Welles was a child murderer in that movie
| right?? I wouldn't trust his words.
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| The intricate mechanisms inside seemingly-frivolous
| curiosities such as the cuckoo clock, or more precisely the
| techniques used to manufacture them, led more-or-less
| directly to the industrial revolution. But then again, the
| cuckoo clock was probably developed in Germany, not
| Switzerland.
| SamReidHughes wrote:
| Meanwhile, Switzerland got a three-peat of Nobel Prizes in
| Medicine in 1948, 1949, and 1950.
|
| It makes sense that a guy like Welles would value art and
| throw scorn on technology. Stability is necessary for
| investment and the build-up of capital; it isn't necessary
| to make a painting.
| keiferski wrote:
| Renaissance Italy was also a hotspot for the development
| of technology, far more than Switzerland at the time. A
| lot of this development was driven by warfare and enabled
| by achievements in the arts: perspective, for example,
| enabled far more detailed schematic drawings. Or, the
| numerous architectural innovations which enabled
| buildings like the Duomo to be constructed. Most of the
| best-known Italian renaissance artists were also
| engineers.
|
| _There's something missing in our appreciation of the
| Renaissance, says Paolo Galluzzi, professor of the
| history of science at the University of Florence-
| something very important. While we rightly glorify this
| period as an extraordinary flowering of humanism and the
| arts, most of us have overlooked the engineering
| accomplishments that were just as much a part of the
| Renaissance as the "Mona Lisa."_
|
| https://www.technologyreview.com/1998/01/01/237121/the-
| art-o...
| toyg wrote:
| Renaissance Italy also invented double-entry accounting,
| effectively creating a new discipline. And then, of
| course, gave us Galileo Galilei.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| He's also wrong about the cuckoo clock. They're from the
| Schwarzwald.
| refurb wrote:
| _Meanwhile, Switzerland got a three-peat of Nobel Prizes
| in Medicine in 1948, 1949, and 1950._
|
| Assuming Nobel prize work is likely a decade or more in
| the making, I'm thinking all their European competition
| was busy trying to stay alive?
| Jtsummers wrote:
| It may be useful to distinguish between Orson Welles, the
| man, and Harry Lime, the antagonist of the movie, played
| by Welles. I don't think it's terribly reasonable to make
| an assertion about what a person thinks by the lines of
| their character. Especially when their character is
| hardly to be considered a model of anything good or
| reasonable.
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _The cuckoo clock._
|
| At least that's something I could hang on my wall.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| It wasn't just the scientists, literally everyone had to do
| it.If you wanted something unique or just unusual ( compared to
| whatever the norm is set to in Moscow). Smart politicians from
| the occupied countries used to come up with some creative ideas
| on how to convince Moscow to give green light for projects and
| etc.
| mike_ivanov wrote:
| I don't understand why are you being downvoted. You are
| factually correct - which I can confirm as a first hand witness
| (and a participant) of what you have described here.
| rgblambda wrote:
| The only major difference I see is that the entrepreneur aims
| to make money from the innovation as opposed to trying to
| improve society. Money was clearly a better motivator though.
| FreakyT wrote:
| Yeah, the "individual motivation" bug still really hasn't
| been fixed in most pure non-capitalist economic system
| proposals IMO. That's why I think a blend works best -- like
| what you see a lot in Europe.
| mantas wrote:
| The major difference is there're multiple investors in
| capitalist society. Essentially they compete with each other
| and more successful investors get to invest in more stuff.
|
| Meanwhile in SSRS-style society, there's a single point of
| approval. There's no market of ideas/thinking. It's set by
| power games, usually not related to the subject at all.
| [deleted]
| nahuel0x wrote:
| Related, this is an interesting relatively modern (1993) book
| about socialist planning + computers + networking:
|
| "Towards a New Socialism" / Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell
|
| http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/
| rileyphone wrote:
| Cockshott has some lectures on youtube as well. He's a pretty
| interesting guy with a background in CS, mostly compilers other
| than the cybernetics.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-07-29 23:00 UTC)