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Kind of interesting that the ARPANET was justified around military grounds and OGAS around economic grounds.

I guess OGAS spiritually lives on the internet now with ad tracking and payment networks where a few companies have detailed views of economic activity.

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It's pretty telling that its the reason why ARPANET succeeded and OGAS failed. But interesting to know that the idea of a decentralized network to manage production demand was already taking place - i always thought if the Soviets had something like that they would have lasted much longer.

ARPNET didn't turn into what it is today because of military usage, and OGAS didn't fail because of it's resource management use. They lived or died because of money. The United States and Soviet Union both had to build all of the precursors and fabric that these systems would run on (telephone lines, computers, etc), which both did. The next logical step was for computers to co-opt existing national infrastructure and create a national network of computers. The Soviet Union faltering elsewhere is why OGAS didn't develop and ARPANET did.

My point was if it wasn't for military usage, ARPANET wouldn't have existed at all. Clearly that was the barrier, since OGAS died for that reason. If they spun it from a military angle, OGAS might have evolved similarly to ARPANET

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