Glushkov is considered one of the “fathers of Soviet cybernetics.” In addition to interesting and accurate predictions about devices and technologies, his most famous project is the unification of all enterprises in the country into the National Automated Network (OGAN). Many students and followers of Glushkov are confident that OGAS could have saved the Soviet Union from collapse, since “manual” administrative-command management of such a complex economy was ultimately doomed to failure. There is no point in speaking in the subjunctive mood, but there is some truth in these arguments. Life has shown that many ideas of cybernetics were needed already in the 21st century. V. M. Glushkov at the Dnepr computer console, 1960. Standing: V.I. Skurikhin, L.A. Korytnaya, V.S. Malinovsky, B.N. But let’s go back to the beginning. In the 1960s, the economy of the Soviet Union was faced with the problem of processing colossal information for planning and making management decisions. The number of products produced in the country has increased, it has become more complex, and the connections between enterprises have become more extensive. New approaches to solving problems were required to maintain coordinated work among all companies in different industries. The problem interested cybernetics scientists. For example, according to their calculations, in order to find out the result of some state actions in the economy, it was necessary to wait 9 months – this is the average time for receiving indicators and processing them from bureaucratic bodies Programmer and programmer Anatoly Kitov proposed creating centers of the Unified State Computer Network (USSVTN), with the help which could simultaneously manage the armed forces and the economy. The network was supposed to be deployed on the basis of computer centers of the Ministry of Defense. In peacetime, these centers were supposed to solve economic, scientific and technical business problems. In the event of military conflicts, the system could be reconfigured to suit the appropriate needs. These powerful computing centers had to be maintained by military personnel, and access to the centers had to be remote. The scientist wrote in detail about his project to Nikita Khrushchev several times. The leadership of the Soviet Union partially supported Kitov’s proposals to accelerate the creation of new computers and their widespread use in various areas of economic life. But the authorities did not accept the basic idea of automating economic management of the entire Soviet Union, essentially rejecting the main project of Kitov Viktor Mikhailovich Glushkov. Then Kitov’s idea was picked up by academician Viktor Glushkov. He called his project OGAS (National Automated Network). The young scientist had experience in managing a large computer center and the Institute of Cybernetics of the Ukrainian SSR Academy of Sciences, as well as participating in the development of the Dnepr digital computer and the first personal computer in the USSR, Mir-1. . . Moreover, “Dnepr” appeared almost simultaneously with its American counterparts and could perform up to 35 thousand operations per second. Mass production of computers in the Soviet Union coincided with the urgent need to move the country to a new technical level. Being one of the most competent automation specialists in the country, Glushkov proposed solving the problem using a computer. The scientist enlisted the support of Vice-President of the Council of Ministers Andrei Kosygin and began work on the creation of automatic control systems (ACS). Kitov became Glushkov’s deputy for several years. It is noteworthy that OGAS was not the only attempt to “change the game” using technology and electronic data interchange. In the early 1970s, the Cybersyn system worked relatively successfully in Chile under President Allende, but due to a military coup, the futuristic project was curtailed. The Soviet Union still had a lot of time and resources ahead to conduct such experiments, so the OGAS project on paper turned out to be hundreds and thousands of times larger in scale. All that remained was to make a political decision and distribute resources. Viktor Glushkov (1982): – Increasing the power of the administrative apparatus cannot be achieved within the framework of traditional paper technology by equipping people with tools that act “in a big way.” Complex automation is required, in which most of the information flows are closed outside the person. This is the essence of paperless technology. The person’s responsibilities will include setting tasks, selecting final options for management decisions, and working informally with people. Before starting to design his supersystem, Glushkov studied in detail the work of factories, mines, railways, airports, state farms, and the State Planning Committee. Gossnab – the Ministry of Finance – was involved in all tasks and stages of planning, as well as any difficulties that arose. The OGAS project was ready before 1964. The project provided for the creation of 100 centers in large industrial cities, from where already processed information would come. be sent to a single national center. These centers must be interconnected by broadband communication channels and connected to 10 thousand centers of enterprises and organizations. A computer-calculated and scientifically based forecast of economic development can become a state plan. The network was supposed to provide complete automation of the process of collecting, transmitting and processing primary data. In the Soviet Union at that time, there were rules for collecting information through four parallel channels, controlled by planning, supply, statistics and finance authorities independent from each other. The authors of the project proposed to enter economic data into the system only once. All information was to be stored in central databases with remote access from anywhere in the system after automatic user verification. Glushkov and his associates hoped to use computers to completely eradicate the widespread practice of data manipulation. transferred to the top. It was impossible to implement the project under private ownership, since the presence of a trade secret did not allow collecting the necessary data for calculations. Victor Glushkov (1982): – If there is an automatic road junction in the city, capable of transmitting information via radio about the current traffic movement, traffic conditions, closed passages, traffic jams, an on-board microcomputer navigator will be useful. By entering into it the task for the trip, the coordinates of the starting and ending points, it will be possible to receive the optimal route from the computer in a few seconds, taking into account that Glushkov’s current plan includes one more position. The cyberneticist believed that a new automated control system would allow control of production, payroll and retail trade. He proposed withdrawing paper money from circulation and completely switching to electronic payments. In addition, the system had to collect and analyze data on important purchases of citizens. The network was supposed to start operating in 1975. The main opponents of the project were economists. Despite the fact that the system expected payback and profit of up to 100 billion rubles in 15 years by solving economic and engineering problems, the costs of launching OGAS exceeded expectations. According to various estimates, to launch OGAS it was necessary to find up to 20 billion rubles and train 300 thousand new specialists. In 1970, the Politburo discussed the OGAS project, adopting it in a shortened form. Instead of implementing the National Automated Economic Management System, it was decided to focus on developing a network of computer centers and creating automated management systems at individual enterprises. Ministries began to build their own computer centers for internal needs. Over five years, the number of automated control systems in the country increased 7 times, but it quickly became clear that industry automated control systems use incompatible hardware and software and are not connected by an interdepartmental network. To unite all this infrastructure into a single system, Glushkov prepared an even more global project, which provided for the emergence by 1990 of 200 centers for collective use in large cities, 2.5 thousand cluster centers for enterprises of one city or industry, etc. . 22.5 thousand individual entrepreneurship centers. OGAS 2.0 already requires 40 billion rubles. Subsequent congresses of the CPSU repeatedly approved updated versions of OGAS, but attempts to create a unified network did not reach an all-Union scale. Over ten years, from 1976 to 1985, 21 unified computer centers were built in the country, which served 2 thousand enterprises. Attempts to unite several centers into a network remained at the experimental level. Remote user access did not work. Due to the poor quality of the channels, communication was often interrupted and running programs froze. Users were forced to work with large volumes of punched cards and printouts—electronic data exchange could only be a dream. The cyberneticist noted that the Soviet statistics and planning bodies back in the 1970s were equipped with calculation and analytical machines of the 1939 model, which were then completely replaced in America by computers. The project never found its “investment” from the state, they are ready to invest in infrastructure, as planned in OGAS Viktor Glushkov (1982): – Books, newspapers, magazines, being convenient and familiar to people, in fact, will retain their current appearance for a long time for a long time. First of all, official correspondence should be reduced as much as possible. A person who at the beginning of the 21st century will not be able to use information will be like a person at the beginning of the 20th century who could neither read nor write. Every educated person should know the basics of paperless computing. Analyzing the reasons for failures, Viktor Glushkov noted that OGAS is much more complex than a nuclear or space research program. This scared the officials. In addition, such a system could significantly influence the political and social aspects of life. In an era of stagnation, such a development of events was unacceptable. There is a story about how, at one of the Politburo meetings, the Minister of Finance spoke about his trip to a poultry farm in Minsk, where poultry farmers allegedly themselves were. “developed a computer” that “made three programs”: it turned on music when the chicken laid an egg, and turned on and off the lights. “Egg production has increased, so it is necessary to automate all poultry farms in the USSR, and then think of all this nonsense as a national system,” concludes a historical anecdote showing the conservative attitude of the bureaucracy, partly prototyped by OGAS of the Internet, but Glushkov himself understood this system as a kind of post-industrial society. It provided for the creation throughout the country of a powerful computer network, much wider than the Internet, with the help of which it would be possible to process, control and adjust management decisions, as well as change the very mechanism of economic management, making it possible to Most operations with computer equipment It is interesting that Glushkova and his ideas are highly valued in the West. The scientist has traveled literally half the world. Encyclopedia Britannica commissioned him to write an article on cybernetics, and the UN Secretary-General appointed him as an adviser. IBM management invited Glushkov to give lectures in the USA and even offered him a high position in the field of development and research. He refused the last offer. In 1982, Viktor Mikhailovich Glushkov died. The iPad, which automation evangelist Glushkov wrote about in the 1980s, was ultimately created not in the Soviet Union, but in the United States.
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