 |
|
|
Item Details
| Title:
|
HOW NOT TO NETWORK A NATION
THE UNEASY HISTORY OF THE SOVIET INTERNET |
| By: |
Benjamin Peters |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| List price:
|
£26.00 |
|
We believe that this item is permanently unavailable, and so we cannot source
it.
|
|
|
|
|
|
| ISBN 10: |
0262534665 |
| ISBN 13: |
9780262534666 |
| Publisher: |
MIT PRESS LTD |
| Pub. date: |
8 September, 2017 |
| Series: |
Information Policy |
| Pages: |
312 |
| Synopsis: |
Between 1959 and 1989, Soviet scientists and officials made numerous attempts to network their nation -- to construct a nationwide computer network. None of these attempts succeeded, and the enterprise had been abandoned by the time the Soviet Union fell apart. Meanwhile, ARPANET, the American precursor to the Internet, went online in 1969. Why did the Soviet network, with top-level scientists and patriotic incentives, fail while the American network succeeded? In How Not to Network a Nation, Benjamin Peters reverses the usual cold war dualities and argues that the American ARPANET took shape thanks to well-managed state subsidies and collaborative research environments and the Soviet network projects stumbled because of unregulated competition among self-interested institutions, bureaucrats, and others. The capitalists behaved like socialists while the socialists behaved like capitalists. After examining the midcentury rise of cybernetics, the science of self-governing systems, and the emergence in the Soviet Union of economic cybernetics, Peters complicates this uneasy role reversal while chronicling the various Soviet attempts to build a "unified information network." Drawing on previously unknown archival and historical materials, he focuses on the final, and most ambitious of these projects, the All-State Automated System of Management (OGAS), and its principal promoter, Viktor M. Glushkov. Peters describes the rise and fall of OGAS -- its theoretical and practical reach, its vision of a national economy managed by network, the bureaucratic obstacles it encountered, and the institutional stalemate that killed it. Finally, he considers the implications of the Soviet experience for today's networked world. |
| Illustrations: |
23 b&w illus. |
| Publication: |
US |
| Imprint: |
MIT Press |
| Prizes: |
Winner of Honorable Mention, 2017 PROSE Awards, History of Science, |
| Returns: |
Returnable |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
No Cheese, Please!
A fun picture book for children with food allergies - full of friendship and super-cute characters!Little Mo the mouse is having a birthday party.
|
My Brother Is a Superhero
Luke is massively annoyed about this, but when Zack is kidnapped by his arch-nemesis, Luke and his friends have only five days to find him and save the world...
|
|
|
|
|