The Internet in Russia developed in parallel in two ways. One went through Soviet scientific research institutes, the other through Russian-American joint ventures. "The Secret of the Firm" figured out how the Russian segment of the Internet appeared in the days of the networked Wild West even before joining the World Wide Web, and who should be thanked for this.
The Internet is a global network that unites many networks and individual computers that communicate using common protocols. One of the Runet fathers, Valeriy Bardin, would later say: “The very concept of the Internet has matured gradually - just like the concept of“Russian”, for example. The global network was formed as a collection of local networks”.
Before the advent of the web, there were many separate networks that were mostly used to communicate among academics. Work on Runet began at about the same time in two camps at once: in one there was the All-Union Research Institute of Applied Automated Systems (VNIIPAS) and the Russian-American joint venture Sovam Teleport, in the other - the Kurchatov Institute, the Institute of Electronic Controllers machines (INEUM), the Institute for Advanced Studies (IPC) of the Ministry of Automobile Industry, the Institute for High Energy Physics, as well as the later DEMOS and Relcom.
Cellulose lifted the iron curtain
On December 16, 1983, a historic event took place, which the Soviet public learned about only two years later. On this day, at VNIIPAS, for the first time in the USSR, a person began to communicate via an international network using the x.25 protocol with users of several countries. It was biochemist Anatoly Klyosov, who acted as a moderator at the first World Computer Conference on Biotechnology. On it, scientists from different countries had to decide how to turn cellulose-containing waste into products useful to humans, such as sugar or alcohol.
A teleconference is a meeting in which persons who are geographically distant from each other can take part, for which telecommunications are used. Netizens are united by common interests, and they become authors of operational information.
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The first teleconference in the USSR looked like this: 12 members of the working group (Klyosov, Kvesitadze, Rakhimov, Lobanok and others) surrounded the terminal in VNIIPAS, thanks to which (through Stockholm University) they joined in the discussion of plants and cellulose emitted by them with colleagues from the UK, USA, Canada, Sweden, Germany, Italy, East Germany and the Philippines. Scientists took turns exchanging about a hundred messages per day - this is the maximum that modems allowed at 360 baud (bit / s). According to Klyosov, every half line the system hung “from a few seconds and minutes until it was completely thrown offline”.
VNIIPAS is a research institute, created in 1982, at that time the only place in the USSR where it was possible to hold teleconferences. Until December 16, 1983, access to the network was carried out unilaterally.
After the end of the teleconference, Klyosov did not stop going to VNIIPAS. The director of the institution, Oleg Smirnov, extended his pass, and the biochemist continued to communicate through the network. According to the scientist, his favorite teleconference was the Speaker Corner, which discussed world news that was not censored in the Soviet Union.
Thus, the teleconferences raised the iron curtain a little. Interestingly, the special services showed no interest in them. “The fact is that we were like a mini-photo lab, which now print films everywhere,” said Nikolai Saukh, who provided the technical side of the process. “If you bring in explicit pornography, they will spank it mechanically, regardless of the content, for the simple reason that it’s a stream. And we had a flow. But if we talk about this topic, I was always surprised by one question. Telex and telegraph devices in the USSR were always behind the iron door in the first section (the first department of VNIIPAS.), Right? But why has no one ever prohibited faxing? The answer is simple: when the bans were invented, there was no fax. Therefore, faxes stood anywhere, they were used both for sending data and for copying. But in order to send a telex, you had to go to the first department, endorse everything according to the rules. So there were a lot of such absurdities."
We like them
In Moscow, across the street from VNIIPAS, on Nezhdanova Street (now Bryusov Lane), there was a house in which Unixoids organized meetings of programmers. According to Saukh, it was at one of them that he met specialists from the Kurchatov Institute: Valery Bardin, Sergei Anshukov, Mikhail Paremsky and others. They would later become the founding fathers of Runet.
“Almost everyone in the Soviet Union who heard anything about this operating system visited the meetings of the Unixoids. People copied the Unix source code for themselves, and then sat down each in their corner and started picking at them,”Sauch said.
Unix is a flexible multi-terminal operating system developed in the United States in the early 1970s. It is not tied to a specific type of computer, which made it possible to adapt it for various hardware. In addition, you can build a network on it. Due to the availability of distributions, almost all protocols on which the Internet is based have been developed for this OS. The programmers who worked on it were called unixoids.
Unix was freely distributed in universities and scientific organizations in the United States, but penetrated into the USSR secretly. For example, Sauch, together with another VNIIPAS programmer Dmitry Zharkovsky, wrote a program with which he downloaded the Unix source code via a synchronous channel from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, a suburb of Vienna. At about half the download, representatives of the Austrian institute noticed the leak and a scandal ensued.
“But from our side, this story had amazing consequences: on the one hand, Oleg Leonidovich (Smirnov. - Sekret's note) had to react, since official papers came with demands to punish the guilty, and on the other hand, he understood that we did a useful job. In the end, he deprived Dima Zharkovsky for one month,”Saukh noted.
Often, Soviet scientists brought tapes with OS distributions from foreign business trips or internships. Thus, Unix ended up at the Kurchatov Institute - in 1983, it was brought by Mikhail Paremsky from the University of California at Berkeley. In the same year, specialists from various scientific organizations (Kurchatovsky, INEUM, IPK Minavtoprom, IHEP, etc.) decided to combine their efforts and the removed tapes with fragments of OS texts in order to develop a Unix-like operating system that would run on Soviet computers. The working name was given to it "Unas" (as opposed to Unix - "they have"). The programmers all as one confirm: they worked on enthusiasm, no instructions from the leadership or assignments from the party were received.
“There was no boss above us. But there was the notorious Valera Bardin's sofa, on which a lot of people met, - shared Saukh. - My favorite pastime was, lying on the couch, to consume a very specific tea. Brewing this tea looks like this: take a glass, pour the tea leaves into it, pour boiling water over it to the very brim, cover it with a saucer and quickly turn it over. The brew is fantastic - everything comes out of tea! And this tea is poured like this. Take the saucer, press with your thumbs, tilt it slightly, due to the inaccuracy of the fit of the glass to the saucer, part of the tea leaves is drained out. It was a very strong tea."
As his colleague Mikhail Davidov described the owner of the sofa, Valery Bardin, he was “a man with a powerful analytical mind, an incredible ability to“powder”the brains of programmers and a disgusting character. He was very useful at the time and did a lot to make Unix a DEMOS."
The Kurchatovites showed the first Soviet version of Unix at a seminar in 1984. After revision, it was named DEMOS (Dialogue Unified Mobile Operating System), and its creators - the USSR Council of Ministers Prize for Science and Technology in 1988, as well as 480 rubles each.
Photo taken immediately after the award ceremony. From left to right, standing in the second row: Yuri Shkolnikov (Kurchatovsky), Anatoly Shatava (NITSEVT), Valery Mitrofanov (NITSEVT), Mikhail Paremsky (Kurchatovsky), Vladimir Gorskoy (INEUM, Minpribor), Nikolai Saukh (INEUM, Minpribor), Mikhail Davidov (IPK Minavtoprom), Vladimir Tikhomirov ("Centerprogrammsystem"), Vladimir Sizov ("Centerprogrammsystem"), Alexey Rudnev (Kurchatovsky). From left to right, sitting in the first row: Vadim Antonov (IPK Minavtoprom), Sergei Usikov (Kurchatovsky), Leonid Egoshin (IHEP, Protvino), Sergei Anshukov (Kurchatovsky), far right - Valery Bardin (Kurchatovsky).
Reliable network
After the seminar in 1984, the head of the computing center of the Kurchatov Institute, Aleksey Soldatov, suggested that Bardin's team create a computer network based on the new OS, similar to the one he saw at the Niels Bohr Institute. This is how the history of the chain and the Relcom company began.
On May 26, 1988, the USSR adopted a law "On cooperation in the USSR", which opened up a number of opportunities for members of cooperatives, including the right to carry out trade activities. Since then, May 26 has been the Day of Entrepreneurship. Some uniksoids from the Kurchatov Institute and IPK Minavtoprom decided to take the opportunity and left their jobs. Under the leadership of Mikhail Davidov, they organized a cooperative "Demos" and began selling distributions of their OS, which were previously distributed free of charge, for 2500 rubles each. Sergey Borodko took up commercial activity. The cooperative is located on Ovchinnikovskaya embankment in a building where homeless people used to sleep on dirty mattresses. They had to be driven away and illegally set up the office of the cooperative, which initially could not even be registered due to the lack of a lease agreement. Yuri Luzhkov, the prime minister of the Moscow government, helped with this at that time. Davidov rented two cell phones from Nokia and brought them to him. He tested the device by calling his wife. Later Davidov wrote: “Luzhkov liked the phone and he said:
Despite the separation, the joint work of Demos, the Kurchatov Institute and other scientific institutions on the network continued. It was launched in the summer of 1990 and was named Relcom. To select it, Vadim Antonov wrote a special program that produced the word relcom. Everyone liked it, especially since it could be deciphered as reliable communication - "reliable network". Scientific institutes of Moscow, Leningrad and Novosibirsk maintained communication through it, the connection speed reached 2400 baud.
Two points of reference
There are several opinions on which day is considered the starting point of the Russian Internet. According to the Kurchatovites, this is August 28, 1990. Then Dmitry Volodin and Vadim Antonov (according to some sources, from the IPK Minavtoprom, according to others - from Ovchinnikovskaya embankment) phoned the administrator of the site at the University of Helsinki and registered at the host of the institution. Thus, the first foreign connection took place. In addition, the Russian Relcom gained access to Usenet, which means uncontrolled communication with the world.
Teleconferencing Usenet (worldwide electronic news system) is a messaging system, a “many-to-many” conversation within the Web. With their help, users communicated with each other in one or several thematic headings. To put it simply, it was a hybrid of email and forums that was the progenitor of the web forums themselves. It was in teleconferencing that concepts such as FAQ and spam first appeared.
“Everyone had a feeling as if an iron curtain had fallen down - before we were in our cave, where sometimes the rumble came from outside, after that, we somehow found ourselves included in this very world that was outside and had our own sorrows and our joys”, - wrote Alexey Rudnev.
Bardeen recalled: “At first there was a stream of mail in amazement - there was discussion:“Is this a joke or not?” and "Is it KGB or not?" There was such a feeling of breaking through the Berlin Wall, especially on the periphery of our network, such a knock-on state."
But Sauch was not impressed by this event: “A guy came from Tallinn (Leo Tomberg. - Approx.“Secret”), said that he talked with dates (Finns. - Approx.“Secret”) and that they can call. Well, we took it and called. At that time, automatic telephone dialing was only available to Finland and Norway from countries outside the socialist camp, so we had little choice. We got through. At the other end was Petri Ojala, I later met with him: a healthy guy, a typical blond Scandinavian, phlegmatic. The guys wrote to him: "Here we are calling from Moscow, but can you give us the opportunity to work?" And he: "What are the problems, here's your login-password." And it all worked. Since we did not drink champagne, the event was not particularly memorable. Maybe because then we were much more interested in communication with each other. So we were primarily concerned with establishing ties within Moscow and the Soviet Union. How was a call to Finland different from a call to, say, Novosibirsk? Nothing. Therefore, we did not remember him. However, we got access to Usenet, got the opportunity to write and read letters."
Relcom's first international contact took place almost exactly one year before the August putsch at the White House. On August 18-21, 1991, programmers from Ovchinnikovskaya embankment broadcast what was happening to the Western media and the whole world. Borodko then personally connected RIA Novosti to Interfax and the Moscow mayor's office. And two weeks before the putsch, another significant event of a worldwide scale happened. On August 6, 1991, American Tim Berners-Lee launched the first website info.cern.ch, where he explained what the World Wide Web is.
Less than a month later, on September 19, 1990, the.su domain was registered. Before that, replies to Soviet letters came to the Finnish server with the same mark and then sent to the desired address. Now communication began to take place directly. This date is considered by some to be the day of the foundation of the Runet.
American footprint
Then the Internet was a toy for a limited circle of people with specific needs. He grew out of an academic environment - scientists had to communicate. Business began to come slowly there in the early 1990s. Gradually, the Relcom network grew, and funding was needed to maintain it. This is how the idea of creating a joint stock company appeared. Initially, it was planned to make the owners of all network nodes shareholders - there were about 80 of them. As Sauch put it, to collect among the poor and divide. But investors appeared. As a result, the Russian Scientific Center "Kurchatov Institute", the Russian Commodity and Raw Materials Exchange, the Russian Investment Joint Stock Company (RINACO), Technobank and others acted as founders, and the founding fathers of the chain received half of all the company's shares each. In 1991, a part of "Demos" was transferred to the new company,which also a year later will turn from a cooperative into an LLC under the leadership of Sergei Borodko. Alexey Soldatov became the president of Relcom, and Valery Bardin became the development director. Both companies became one of the first Russian providers.
Then other big players appeared, but many of them were joint ventures of the USSR / Russia and America. Thus, the Glasnet provider was created by the American Association for Progressive Communications, journalist Anatoly Voronov and programmers Alexander Zaitsev and Pavel Prokopenko, Sprint Network is a joint venture between Central Telegraph and Sprint International Communications, Sovam Teleport is VNIIPAS and San Francisco Moscow Teleport George Soros.
The latter began in the USSR with two hippies (according to one of them): one real, from the "city of flowers" San Francisco, director of San Francisco Moscow Teleport Joel Schatz, and the other - Soviet - computer adjuster Andrei Kolesnikov.
“It was May 1988. I had a friend who worked on the Arbat on psychiatric issues, - Kolesnikov shared. - He said that the person who set up his e-mail needs an assistant who understands computers. I didn’t know what e-mail was, but I knew about computers - I already had experience with the American Eclispe S230 computer. Therefore, I went to Arbat, to Maly Afanasyevsky lane, met Shats and a dialogue was started between us:
According to Schatz, he did not seek to build a telecommunications business in Russia, but he really wanted to bring the two countries closer together and avoid a nuclear war. He agreed on cooperation with VNIIPAS, and as a result, in 1990 the institute and San Francisco Moscow Teleport created Sovam Teleport. Access to the American network was through a node maintained by Oleg Smirnov's employees.
Owl Teleport had direct digital access to the United States via satellite. Demos and Relcom had a different approach - they carried out complex branching messaging through Finland.
“Joel and his good friend Joseph Goldin (who in 1982, together with Steve Wozniak, set up the first teleconference between the USSR and the United States. this slowly received pictures from the camera installed on the opposite side. Such a video call over the phone. We only had to order it in advance: it was necessary to set a time, they would put you in a queue, and only when your time came, the bell rings, and let's go,”Andrei Kolesnikov said. - This is an absolute partisan. There were no regulations that governed the possibility or impossibility of using the Internet, the same in America. Therefore, when we were asked the question: "Who gave you permission?" - we answered: "Who forbade us?"
Later, Sovam Teleport launched the Russia-On-Line service, headed by Kolesnikov. It became the first Russian mass Internet service. In parallel, Glasnet developed, which in 1999 was transferred to Owls Teleport. Cityline shot next, becoming the first provider with a fixed payment - $ 36.6.
Third reference point
Providers began to grow like weeds and appear in many cities in Russia. Now you can use the.ru domain. To register it, you had to write an application. “It's funny, but the domains were run by one person - John Postel - Kolesnikov shared. - He had one condition: you can get the root national domain only if you confirm the interest of all market participants and Internet users (there were only a few thousand of them then). Therefore, when he received several separate applications from operators for the delegation of this domain, he told the providers to choose an organization that would manage the.ru domain, and then, with an agreement on the agreement, return to it”.
On December 4, 1993, the largest Russian providers signed an agreement “On the procedure for administering the.ru zone”. From that moment until 2000, technical support and domain registration was carried out by the Russian Research Institute for the Development of Public Networks (RosNIIROS). Later, these responsibilities were taken over by the Coordination Center for the national domain of the Internet, which was also headed by Andrey Kolesnikov. Five months later, on April 7, 1994, the.ru domain was registered. This date is the third birthday of Runet.
Instead of a conclusion
On July 22, 2000, the Okinawa Charter of the Global Information Society was adopted at the G8 leaders' summit, which outlined the main approaches to using the opportunities of digital technologies, bridging the digital divide, promoting universal participation and further development. Its developers believed that the Internet would become the basis for the development of a new society and a new economy. This is what happened in the end.
