
Soviet scientists tried for decades to network their nation - jonbaer
https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-soviets-invented-the-internet-and-why-it-didn-t-work
======
patkai
The Cybernetics angle is really interesting. I thought the Chilean Cybersyn
project
-[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2003/sep/08/sciencene...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2003/sep/08/sciencenews.chile)
\- led by Stafford Beer was an isolated case, but apparently not. An even more
distant angle: I just read the autobiography of David Hilbert, and apparently
he thought Norbert Wiener was an fraud of some sort. Cybernetics, Systems
Science, Complex Systems - these draw a certain type person, and apparently a
type of political system, too.

------
danielmorozoff
This is a fantastic writeup. this quote really struck me and seems very apt to
today:

'Glushkov’s story is also a stirring reminder to the investor classes and
other agents of technological change that astonishing genius, far-seeing
foresight and political acumen are not enough to change the world. Supporting
institutions often make all the difference. '

~~~
neolefty
And:

"There is an irony to this. The first global computer networks took root in
the US thanks to well-regulated state funding and collaborative research
environments, while the contemporary (and notably independent) national
network efforts in the USSR floundered due to unregulated competition and
institutional infighting among Soviet administrators. The first global
computer network emerged thanks to capitalists behaving like cooperative
socialists, not socialists behaving like competitive capitalists."

~~~
simonh
Yet mobile networks flourished in heavily regulated Europe, largely due to
enforced standardization, years before they became ubiquitous in the USA.

I worked in the Mobile industry in the late 90s. I remember being on a bus in
Madrid airport taking us to our plane. Some young Spaniards were talking
loudly on their mobiles while the two American tourists sitting near me gaped
at them. One turned to the other and said 'Those things are everywhere. They
use them all the time.' It was probably just a brief period of time, but I
found it striking.

~~~
berntb
Look up the OSI standards. They were a horror to implement and use.

The telecom companies wanted those to be used instead of the US tcp/ip stack.
They would have had much more control and could have been fat cats, taking a
large piece of the slice.

Be damn happy they failed. :-)

A heterogeneous world is an advantage, it gets harder for oligopolies to
charge at every gate.

~~~
raattgift
There was a substantial overlap between the then Internet Activities Board and
the committees associated with ISO/IEC 7498, and it was far from dominated by
telecomms companies at the time. Indeed, Lyman Chapin of BBN was in ca. 1992
the chair of both! Other overlappers included Christian Huitema and IIRC Dave
Katz.

The OSI reference model itself originated with Charles Bachman (Honeywell,
then IBM).

So far, no telecomms companies to be seen.

Telecomms companies and agencies were more interested in EDI in the form of
X.400(84) and to some extent X.500 directory services, rather than in the
lower layers, and while they were heavily invested in X.25, they were not the
biggest pushers for the connection-oriented lower layers -- there were plenty
of private X.25 networks operated by government agencies (including many non-
PTT ones; bear in mind that the CCITT of the time was national governments
represented by their local postal-telegraph-and-telecommunications ministries;
the U.S. and Canada were huge outliers in having privately owned commercial
telcos). There were also research & education networks with X.25 underneath,
including CSNET (largely based in the USA) which was definitely part of the
TCP/IP-speaking Internet.

OSI's problems weren't in the people involved or in the (admittedly heavy)
formalisms that go into ISO/IEC/CCITT/ITU standards, but rather that the idea
was to redo TCP/IP "right", and that included supporting difficult to
reconcile goals, like supporting both connection-less and connection-oriented
protocols in most of the lowest of the 7 layers, and then mechanisms to
provide interoperability between CO-only and CL-only talkers.

At the time, well before FPGAs and ASICs were accelerating routers, and when
megabytes of RAM were expensive (and slow), OSI appeared too heavyweight
compared to TCP/IP, and that is one of many reasons TCP/IP won. OSI reference
implementations were expensive rather than free as in beer (sort-of);
compiling up your OSI elements took considerably longer; an OSI-equipped
kernel was fat (too fat if it was only really talking ES-IS and nothing else);
and so forth. SMTP/TCP/IP was what members of the OSI subcommittees were using
to communicate with one another, in spite of the existence of EAN for X.400
and some native OSI CLNP (AlterNet, UUNET's internetwork, in the very early
1990s carried real CLNP traffic between RAND and several other organizations).

Internet protocols did benefit from the OSI development work; good ideas from
IDRP found their way into BGP4; IS-IS is still the IGP of choice for some
large IP networks; LDAP, SNMP and others absorbed good ideas from X.500 and
EFTAM; and of course DSL and OTN systems have a lot of OSI in their DNA.

Finally, the U.S. government's GOSIP and similar programmes for mandatory
adoption of OSI networking elsewhere probably doomed OSI networking much more
than politics (and personality conflicts) among people involved in actually
making the standards in the various bodies, both international (and national)
and in the IETF and its close relatives. Taking profile "short cuts" to roll
out OSI networking rapidly in that way raised the real possibility of fully
conforming OSI networks (and stacks) that would nevertheless be mutually
incompatible!

Unfortunately many of the lessons learned in the failure of OSI networking
were not applied in the process of choosing and standardizing a successor
protocol for IP, and here we are a couple decades later with IPv6 being a
compromise specification designed for speed of roll out... (In fact some of
the wrong lessons learned in the very early 1990s of OSI networking are in
IPv6 today: the expectation that being CPU constrained, routers must deal with
relatively short, fixed-length, fixed-format fields (rather than, say,
something self-describing) is front-and-centre in IPv6 addressing and headers
generally. Concerns about overheads are also well-reflected in IPv6, and for
terrestrial applications, those concerns were obsoleted by the turn of the
century.)

"A hetereogeneous world is an advantage". Well, try explaining that on the
IETF mailing list as a reason to support concurrent development of a successor
protocol to IPv6.

~~~
berntb
Exhaustive, informative and insightful. Please don't write that stuff were
people won't see it. :-)

(I'd add that X.25 was moved into the OSI standards, btw. But you certainly
know that.)

But you agree with my point that you couldn't really implement all those
protocols in a serious manner, at least not at the time. You saw
specifications of buffer counters that were "infinite". OK, that is possible
to implement -- and today maybe even efficiently.

Also, the ones pushing this were states and big corporations, typically
telecom. The exact details motivations you seem to know more about, but you
don't really touch it? The academic world felt pressure to conform and go OSI
instead.

(I would argue that with IoT, protocol/processing overheads might again become
an issue on Earth and outside of instruments in the oceans?)

~~~
raattgift
Weirdly there was shortly after this, and totally coincidentally (since as you
may suspect, nobody involved has seen my previous comment) a number of old
grey beard networkers were having a discussion about what happened to OSI on a
social media platform, and two observations stood out. Firstly, before
Marshall Rose et al.'s ISODE there was no free-as-in-beer OSI networking
implementation for any platform. Typically OSI networking was available at
extra (and high) cost, and the official standards documents were both
expensive and tightly access-controlled. Secondly, ISODE itself took a very
long time to download and build even on the fastest platforms of the time. By
comparison, UNIX systems were already talking TCP/IP out of the box (not quite
"free", after all this was before the BSDI lawsuit) and RFCs were readily
available and distributable, so free in most senses.

Telecomms companies were at the time largely state-owned agencies;
deregulation and privatization were only happening in the UK and Sweden, and
only by accidents of history did the USA and Canada have private for-profit
companies doing telecomms business (and even in parts of Canada there was
partial government ownership). Most of Europe still had monopoly incumbent
carriers, state owned, and often directly part of (or even the whole of) the
postal & telecommunications ministry. While some management may have been
profit-minded, most of them were geared towards resisting competition, even
mutual competition, until DG4 (now the Directorate-General for Competition)
effectively forced open cross-border markets within Europe in the name of the
single market in 1996-1997. Internal competition took longer in most member-
states, and rules on state subsidy forced most of the PTTs to spin off their
telecommunications (and postal) operations (one could hardly call them
businesses in many cases) into separate entities with outside shareholders.
That's when greed set in. :-) Before that it was merely monopoly pricing,
terrible cost control, and long term views on investing in new technologies
(do it slowly, because the old equipment has not yet been fully depreciated!).

By way of counter-example, at least one large U.S. telecomms company was
actively supportive of TCP/IP, hosting an early IETF, and so forth, while
still participating in OSI and other non-TCP-related networking standards
bodies, including the ITU/IEC/ISO (however it is formally the U.S. State
Department which attends the meetings; operators are invited to sit with and
brief the full-time civil servants; this model is how ITU-T continues to
operate, even though there is now no European or North American telecomms
company with significant state ownership).

Moreover, the member-states of the international bodies were not really
pushing OSI, they were facilitating it. Again, full-time government officials
would be the formal attendees, but they would bring along academics and
researchers from public and private institutions. The OSI networking process
was deliberately a "smushed" together cooperation among several standards
bodies, so that rather than say ANSI and its non-USA counterparts attending an
ISO meeting, "the network nerds" could actually all meet together as peers and
carry on work informally via (funnily enough) email mainly transported by
SMTP.

Certainly some of "the network nerds" were working with large technology firms
with vested interests in particular technologies -- IBM comes instantly to
mind -- but they were a diverse bunch, much as in the IETF became (ignoring
issues of number of IETF meeting attendees, which became large). Fronting for
one's company happens, and the ISO/IEC processes were initially designed to
avoid that. Indeed, there remains tension in the IETF about whether
participants are supposed to be individuals or acting directly in the
interests of their employers.

I agree with you that there were some crazy ideas in the OSI networking
protocol suite, and there are good reasons to pick on CLNP as a networking
layer in particular. However, I think that had the standards been freely
available and redistributable like RFCs, and there was wider involvement early
in the drafting process, both the Internet suite of protcols and OSI's would
have improved, and likely converged substantially. Likewise, the ability to
tinker with OSI networking even on hefty workstations or minicomputers arrived
much later than things like Phil Karn's KA9Q NOS for personal computers(for
example). There _was_ effort to try to make a lighter-weight ISODE, and it
made some progress [0] but it was very late to the party, and was not
obviously better than TCP/IP, so it was no more likely to be rapidly adopted
(except by serious enthusiasts) than IPv6 was for its first dozen years...

The international standards bodies vs IETF-and-relatives story became very
different a few years later, although not about OSI networking as such, but
rather about how to do "broadband ISDN", with the general idea being that a
stack of protocols built for ATM (which still sees wide use and utility in the
last mile in DSL) should replace IP. ATM standardization was a mess with
differing interests, and yes there was tension between the PTTs, computer
networking academia, the radio & other wireless broadcast sectors, and so
forth, and there are many compromises baked into the ATM standard suite at
various layers. Moreover, there was telecomm-vs-telecomm conflict, and
conflict among various equipment vendors. Additionally, ITU-T began its long
civil war among fully commercialized telecomms agencies (with strong lobbyists
convincing their governments of their rightness) versus government monopolies,
particularly in the developing world. The latter didn't particularly dislike
TCP/IP, they simply wanted to avoid losing the phone call termination fee
scheme that in many countries were a noticeable portion of overall foreign
earned income.

The processing overheads in networking today, for end systems, is almost
wholly encryption and decryption in terms of energy and latency. It is likely
that specialized low-energy implementations will arrive before anyone can
define what "IoT" means at least as well as the UK Prime Minister defines
Brexit. :-) Meanwhile, low-power systems can adopt strategies like talking
more slowly or using slower but lower-power-consuming implementations of
algorithms; TCP will properly throttle if a "Thing" is much slower than its
counterparties (that's part of what TCP is for!). Even terrestrially there are
remote end systems which are stuck talking mere hundreds of bits per second,
and the Internet suite of protocols mostly scales down to those speeds (in
part since many of the protocols started near there).

Consider that in 1993 the IETF rejected the use of a simple CRC in the IPv6
header on the grounds of processing cost and byte overhead, and that in 1991
people preferred SLIP to PPP because of the latter's overheads. I don't think
they could honestly have been expected to imagine AES-NI or lz4 or the like
managing hundreds of megabytes per second throughputs on personal computer
grade equipment, but even at the time such "savings" decisions seemed
shortsighted ...

------
walter_bishop
"The distributed network was originally designed to nudge the US ahead of the
Soviets, allowing scientists’ and government leaders’ computers to communicate
even in the event of a nuclear attack. "

[https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-soviets-invented-the-
internet...](https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-soviets-invented-the-internet-and-
why-it-didn-t-work)

No no no, the Arpanet was never designed to survive a nuclear war, the
originators are even quoted as saying so.

footnotes 5: [http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-
internet/histor...](http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-
internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet)

------
digi_owl
As best i can tell, the soviet system dreamed up by Lenin and cooped into a
personality cult by Stalin was pretty much a bastardization of what Marx was
envisioning.

Not that communism and Socialism was more than far flung ideals even for Marx.
For the most part he was appalled by the working conditions of factory workers
at his time.

That said, ol' Marx was not completely against capitalism. He did see that it
had the capacity to rapidly industrialize a nation.

What he did point out though was inherent flaws in the system, flaws not just
relevant to worker exploitation but also the whole engine of spending money to
earning even more money. In that he perhaps noticed a hint of something that
even present day mainstream economics has problem noticing, the feedback loops
related to the flow of money and goods.

Notice that the article mentions in passing equilibria. That is a notion that
is persistent within economics, even though it introduced more to make the
math easier to work with back when it was done by hand and pencil.

these days all but economics have abandoned any notion of equilibrium, instead
using computers to model complex systems and their feedbacks. Something that
was spearheaded by meteorologists trying to improve weather prediction.

To go back to Marx, what he envisioned was more a transition from capitalist
owned factories to worker owned factories. Coops essentially. Things like
trading would still remain, as they provide vital means of signaling along the
supply chains.

He did btw have some nasty things to say about finance capital, perhaps
forewarning both the great depression and out present situation.

His great lament in that regard was that industrial capitalists were more
likely to side with finance capital in any three way struggle between them and
the workforce, when industrial capitalists would be better off in the long run
to side with the workforce against finance.

------
arcanus
A reminder that Soviet science used to rival the West's capabilities, or even
surpass them.

A pity that Russia has fallen so far behind in this regard.

~~~
zokier
While true in some areas, computers and advanced electronics was not one of
those things. I don't think Soviets really ever got very good at producing
integrated circuits, and even less at designing them. By mid-70s when stuff
like less-than-room-sized computers and internet really began to take form,
Soviets were already almost exclusively trying to keep up with western
microprocessor tech with straight up clones, with the gap consistently
increasing.

------
alexro
Glushkov has build a unique PC too

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIR_(computer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIR_\(computer\))

------
baybal2
the reason it failed abd the guy got fried was simple

if state company records were kept off-site on a computer, it will make quiet
ledger rigging and stealing from state companies harder. That would be
outrageous for every commie as every commie was stealing cash from the state
one way or another.

