The Soviet web: the tale of how the USSR almost invented the internet (2017)
calvertjournal.com
calvertjournal.com
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.
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?
[1] ie. stock tickers, terminals of time share mainframes, or see plan 55-A for a wider interconnected switched network this russian idea
"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.
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.
It’s gone in newer DSL variants and not in DOCSIS? Or am I wrong?
> "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.
Fun times.
IPv4 will probably never go away because it's a better choice for private networks.
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 Geisterbahnhöfe (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.
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.
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...
(As an aside, why do you feel the need to be so confrontational...?)
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.
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.
What?
In fact, the votes that I've seen brought under suspicion are precisely those were ballots were collected in a central location before being counted.
I don't see the evidence supporting that assertion. The US has by and large moved to a top-down design since the 1950s:
Creation of Medicare
Creation of OSHA
Creation of EPA
Occupational licensing rising from 5% of jobs, in 1950, to 29% today.
The Code of Federal Regulations massively expanding since the 1950s: https://www.mercatus.org/video/visualizing-growth-federal-re...
Govermment spending as a percentage of GDP increasing substantially since the 1950s.
The financial surveillance state growing rapidly in scope, with OFAC, FinCEN - only created in 1990 - and other financial crime/surveillance agencies becoming far more substantial in their impact on banking and finance.
Healthcare regulations have become significantly more burdensome since the 1950s:
https://www.athenahealth.com/knowledge-hub/practice-manageme...
Public sector unions have also become much more powerful since the 1950s, with deleterious effects.
In teaching: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/111/3/671/1839935
In policing: https://ideas.repec.org/p/ces/ceswps/_7718.html
The bright spots in the economy, in terms of providing more value for less cost to the consumer, are all bottom up, whether it's the internet and digital industries, consumer electronics, or the food industry. These are heavily dominated by the private sector and relatively unhampered by government regulation, and consequently, very competitive.
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.
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).
In 1991 they played with local TCP/IP in Moscow, in 1992 started to make dialup calls to Finland with SLIP instead of pure UUCP. Only in 1993 several permanent TCP/IP links from Russia (Demos, SOVAM Teleport, etc) to the West were finally established.
Please also check detailed history: http://ru.arf.ru/Hrono/index.html
12-19 August 1990.
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.
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.
The law was written to make it illegal to be suspected of counter-revolutionary activities. So it's the burden is not to prove the crime, just to prove the suspicion of a crime.
I don't feel being anti-Soviet is bad, unless it means misleading people to serve your goals (as the comparison to Voice of America and by extension to propaganda implies).
I guess you mean some aspects of Soviet Union were mischaracterized, or presented in a more negative way then they should have been.
Did you feel that's what the book did? I'm curious what part?
It is as if someone wrote an anti-US book that takes place in antibellum South and never mention slavery.
I'm not saying that every book set in a certain time period must delve into the worst parts of that period, but it could hardly be called anti-that country if it doesn't.
Important difference.
And the CIA never overthrew Allende. Chile was never a banana republic. The myth the CIA held the strings is just an American conceit. IIRC, Allende's overthrow was orchestrated by the Chilean Senate, where Allende supporters only nominally held power, and only until Allende's expropriations became intolerable to moderates.
The truth is that for better or worse, Chile was too conservative for both Allende and socialism. It's like the U.S. that way--a relatively conservative society where liberal factions only enjoy sporadic (albeit crucial) successes.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27310479-how-not-to-netw...
Douglas Engelbart's "Mother of all Demos" still blows my mind every time I watch it. Douglas Engelbart was inspired by Vannevar Bush "Memex.
[0] "Кто за стеной?" (1977) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECvsD4b0JlU
Powerful countries have agendas. I cannot think of any entity that names itself a "country" that does not.
"Towards a New Socialism" / Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell
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.
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.
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.
- Orson Welles, The Third Man, 1949
Ancient Greece was also exceptionally politically unstable and yet produced the foundations of Western civilization.
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.
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...
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?
At least that's something I could hang on my wall.
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]
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Seems like corporate America to me...
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. https://www.bloggerzune.com/2020/06/whatsapp-web-scan.html?m...
Unfortunately it’s not so clear humanity is unambiguously better off with it. Social media is certainly stress-testing society.
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.
Incidentally, does not look like bullshit jobs were specific to the USSR, they are indeed everywhere.
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).
I recommend reading about the theory of the firm to understand why they emerge and what makes them efficient.
By the fall of the SSSR the black market of illegally imported goods constituted a huge chunk of the soviet economy.
Also I find intriguing how I got downvoted just by questioning. Makes you wonder how wisely those mod powers are being used.
By the fall of USSR, big chunks of black market were becoming legal :) Black market was a massive portion of economy throughout USSR existence though.
Some people still buy old good CCCP propaganda. And even questioning fairy tale propaganda is bad for those people.
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
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.
Apartments queues were much shorter in small purpose-built industrial towns in the middle of nowhere
Dangerous jobs in bumfucknowhere (far north etc) were paid $$$$$
One couldn't be a writer or artist without attending university. And spots at university were limited. State needs X writers or artists in 5 years so that's how many spots are available this year. On top of that, being jobless was a crime. So you couldn't just pursue artsy stuff and leech off society either.
Same for the rest of the labour market. Central planning wants to kickstart XYZ factory in 5 years? Suddenly related universities get spots in XYZ next fall. You want to do ABC instead? Tough luck. Either study XYZ or do some unskilled job for years till few spots in ABC become available.
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.
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.
Call it "real property tax", or call it "domain registration fees" -- if you don't pay up, the item is taken away.
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.
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.
I have the option of changing those terms to give my tenants effectively all ownership privileges except responsibility for some official correspondence with the city, e.g. property taxes.
If I fail to pay quarterly property taxes, the city will have a different opinion about who "owns" the property. They will divest me of all ownership and operating privileges, and I will not be free to offer them to others. My feelings on the matter are irrelevant, because they have guns and prisons.
I "own" several domain names. In fact, I also lease one domain name to a lessor under fairly traditional terms for domain names. I have given the lessor basically full operating rights to the domain, except responsibility for official interactions with the registrar.
If I fail to pay annual domain registration fees, the registrar/foodchain will have a different opinion about who "owns" the domain name. They will divest ... etc, see above. My feelings on the matter are irrelevant, since they have control of the administration of the .com TLD.
Your point, I think, is that you do not "own" a domain name. Because registrar agreements, ICANN oversight, court decisions, obligatory lease payments, etc.
I agree. But you seem to misunderstand how real estate property "ownership" works (in the US). It's not meaningfully different. I might even have more ownership privileges over domain names (I can serve autoplaying videos with loud audio all day long) than I have privileges over my real property (I cannot play loud music without being financially and legally censured).