Comment by orbital-decay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by orbital-decay | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This comment just recites the popular myth which makes zero sense, especially in the context of the video in OP, which is about a soviet computer.

Cybernetics has nothing to do with computing or computers at all; it was a very opinionated attempt at explaining natural and social phenomena in terms of some narrow snippets of control theory. Nothing from that media panic "set USSR back" in computing; the control theory was being used in engineering (case in point: R-7 with a SOTA control system), computers were being developed (BESM-6 was introduced long after the moral panic caused by Wiener's book ended), etc.

The real cause was the engineering tradition (and planned economy which led to twisted economic incentives). Soviet engineering school has been influenced by the German one for half a century, and was really slow at picking up computer science and software engineering as separate disciplines; both were mostly seen as some unimportant subset of applied math. It wasn't some ideological bullshit, just genuine inertia. By the time US programmers had a strong software development culture, Soviet programming culture was stuck at the pure math level. Just read any Soviet textbook or programming manual from that era and you will see the difference immediately. Hardware development has been following suit, struggling not just from the lack of the expertise in high purity chemistry (traditionally weak point of Soviet physics and engineering) and semiconductors, but also from the lack of direction set by the software development and economic incentives. That's why the Soviets decided to copy IBM - and the computer in OP is an IBM PC clone. Not because of the cybernetics (the panic was unrelated and died long before that decision) or any other reason.

>that it would never catch up

Hardware, sure. The software development eventually started to catch up around mid-80s, when the Soviet computing craze has started with first personal computers that were more or less accessible to the population.

As somebody who grew up as a person and as a programmer in 80s, the problem wasn't purity of the math or the chemicals. The problem was an extremely crappy level of manufacturing quality in everything and lacking facilities in quantity of available technology. I was lucky to grow up in a big city, have educated parents and study in one of the best schools in the country. So I had access to a variety of hardware and software and technology (domestic and imported). Most people however barely had access to programmable calculators, and the only way to actually get access to a PC-level computer would be either work in one of the places where it deemed necessary or build one by yourself (not that the parts would be easily accessible too, you may have to go to a special marketplace, etc.).

Same thing was with information materials - Soviet ones were badly made, severely outdated and rarely available without some kind of special access (you had to know people). I had to translate things from foreign materials (yes, I was lucky to know the right people to gain access to some foreign computer journals), bring books from other neighboring countries (e.g. Bulgaria), etc. As I said, I was lucky - most of my age peers were at best told what the computer is and how one would program it on a whiteboard, if at all.

So yes, by the 80s the Lysenkoist wars were in the past, and actually computers were thought as a way to solve the inadequacies of socialist planning (by then amply evident to all smart people, who were furiously searching for ways to prop up the collapsing system). But general weaknesses of economy, scientific culture, engineering culture, consumer goods manufacturing and in general overall decay of nearly everything (that very soon led to the collapse of the system) ensured that Soviet computer industry was constantly way behind and reduced to badly copying old Western samples, both in the high and consumer ends. It wasn't some one "panic" event that set the Soviets back - it was the inevitable consequence of the overall societal model, and could not have been avoided.

That said, once the USSR collapsed and people could access the world's technology and information freely, people from ex-Soviet countries caught up pretty quickly on the software, indeed - there are a lot of excellent programmers there, though many of them are "from there" already.

I heard a story of Sun Microsystems clones but because of manufacturing issues they basically had kernal patches for each individual silicone chip.

I once read an interesting idea that communism could have worked if implemented with modern information technology. Or at least the supermarkets wouldn't have been empty.

That's what they tried to do in the 70s, essentially. Even with the modern computing power, it wouldn't work for multiple reasons, but they certainly gave it a good try, and given the caliber of the people involved (Glushkov, Kolmogorov, etc.) the lack of talent wasn't the problem. The impossibility of the solution likely was.

Yes thanks, I was a kid in the 80s and almost forgot how bad it was. Having a technology prototyped in some research institute indeed means nothing if you can't produce it without the product immediately falling apart in consumers' hands (in the best case).

Still, by the second half of 80s home computers were more or less available. IIRC a BK-0010 or Mikrosha were around 500-600 rubles, about three monthly salaries of a senior engineer, a lot of people had them, including my family and my uncles/grandparents. And there was a substantial "ecosystem" of a sort around them. Regarding the PCs and workstations, my grandfather, a mechanical engineer (not related to computers in any way), looked for the 1840 in particular (he had some ideas that never worked out) and was able to get it at home by finding the right people, for 1/3 the official price. Which was a lot.

I'd still argue that Lysenkoism can't be compared to the cybernetics panic. The former was an actual attempt to bend the science, the latter was more or less a nothingburger caused by some party cogs freaking out at the suggestion that a PID loop can explain (or Engels forbid, control) the politics. Although they seem to think otherwise in Czechia: apparently that moral panic rippled through the entire Eastern Bloc, and for example forced Antonin Svoboda [1] to leave the country.

>you had to know people

It was a motto of living in USSR, it applied to... everything, basically.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton%C3%ADn_Svoboda_(computer...

I really liked this book on the topic: https://www.goodreads.com/da/book/show/57615568-collapse

The inevitability of the USSR collapse was certainly framed that way by pro-western ideologues, but my understanding is that it was the result of conscious reforms and more often than not, blunders, taken on Gorbachev and his cadre of supporters.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com