“The day is not far off when ordinary books, newspapers and magazines will disappear. Each person will carry with them an electronic notepad - a combination of a flat-panel display with a miniature radio transceiver. By typing the required code on the keyboard of this notebook, one can, being anywhere on the planet, recall texts and images from giant computer databases, which will replace not only books, magazines and newspapers, but also televisions,”he wrote in the early 1980s Soviet cyberneticist Viktor Glushkov in his book Fundamentals of Paperless Informatics.
There were still two decades left before the massive spread of the Internet, tablets and smartphones.
Glushkov is considered one of the “fathers of Soviet cybernetics”. In addition to curious and accurate predictions about gadgets and technologies, his most famous project is the unification of all enterprises in the country into the National Automated Network (OGAS).
Many students and followers of Glushkov are sure that the OGAS could save the Soviet Union from collapse, since the "manual" command and control management of such a complex economy was ultimately doomed to failure. It makes no sense to speak in subjunctive moods, but there is some truth in these arguments. Life has shown that many of the ideas of cybernetics have been in demand already in the 21st century. Glushkov "predicted" the emergence of mobile devices, car navigators, electronic currency and electronic document management, as well as partly the Internet.
But back to the beginning.
By the 1960s, the economy of the USSR was faced with the problem of processing an enormous amount of information for planning and making management decisions. The number of the range of products manufactured in the country has grown, it has become more complex, and the connections of enterprises have become more ramified. To maintain the coordinated work of all enterprises in different industries, new approaches to solving problems were required. Scientists of cybernetics became interested in the problem. For example, according to their calculations, in order to find out the result of any government actions in the economy, it was necessary to wait 9 months - this is the average time for receiving indicators and processing them by bureaucratic authorities.
In 1958, the military programmer and developer Anatoly Kitov proposed to create a Unified State Network of Computer Centers (EGSVC), with the help of which it would be possible to simultaneously control the armed forces and the economy. The network was supposed to be deployed on the basis of the computing centers of the Ministry of Defense. In peacetime, these centers were supposed to solve economic, scientific and technical problems of enterprises. In the event of military conflicts, the system could be reconfigured to suit the needs. These powerful computing centers were to be serviced by military personnel, and access to the centers was supposed to be made remote.
The scientist several times wrote in detail about his project to Nikita Khrushchev. The leadership of the USSR partially supported Kitov's proposals for the accelerated creation of new computers and their widespread use in various areas of economic life. But the authorities did not accept the main idea of automating the management of the economy of the entire USSR, actually rejecting Kitov's main project.
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Then the idea of Kitov was picked up by Academician Viktor Glushkov. He named his project - OGAS (National Automated Network). Behind the shoulders of the young scientist was the experience of managing a large computing center and the Institute of Cybernetics at the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, as well as participation in the development of the digital computer "Dnepr" and the first personal computer in the USSR "Mir-1". By the way, Dnepr appeared almost simultaneously with its American counterparts and could perform up to 35 thousand operations per second.
The mass production of computers in the Soviet Union coincided with the urgent need for the country's economy to move to a new technical level. Being one of the most competent automation specialists in the country, Glushkov proposed solving the problem with a computer.
The scientist enlisted the support of the Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers Andrey Kosygin and began to work on the creation of automated control systems (ACS). Kitov, on the other hand, became Glushkov's deputy for several years.
It is noteworthy that OGAS was not the only attempt to "turn the game" through technology and electronic data exchange. In the early 1970s, the Cybersin system operated relatively successfully in Chile under President Allende, but due to a military coup, the futuristic project was curtailed. The USSR still had plenty of time and resources to carry out such experiments, so the OGAS project on paper turned out to be hundreds and thousands of times larger. All that remained was to make a political decision and allocate resources.
Before starting the design of his supersystem, Glushkov studied in detail the work of factories, mines, railways, airports, state farms, State Planning Commission, Gossnab, the Ministry of Finance, having dealt with all the tasks and stages of planning, as well as the difficulties encountered.
The OGAS sketch was ready by 1964. The project envisaged the creation of 100 centers in large industrial cities, from where already processed information would come to a single nationwide center. These centers were to be connected with each other by broadband communication channels and connected to 10 thousand centers of enterprises and organizations. Calculated with the help of computers and scientifically based forecast in the economy could turn into a state plan.
The network was supposed to provide complete automation of the process of collecting, transferring and processing primary data. In the Soviet Union at that time, there were rules for collecting information through four parallel channels, controlled by planning, procurement, statistics and finance bodies independent of each other. The authors of the project proposed to enter economic data into the system only once. All information was supposed to be stored in central data banks with remote access to them from anywhere in the system after automatic user verification.
Glushkov and his associates hoped to use computers to completely eliminate the widespread practice of manipulating data transmitted upstairs. It was impossible to implement the project under private ownership, since the presence of a commercial secret made it impossible to collect the necessary data for making calculations.
Glushkov's original design included one more provision. The cyberneticist believed that the new automated control system would control production, payroll, and retail. He proposed to exclude paper money from circulation and completely switch to electronic payments. In addition, the system was supposed to collect and analyze data on significant purchases of citizens.
The network was supposed to go online in 1975. Economists were the main opponents of the project. Despite the fact that the system assumed a payback and profit of up to 100 billion rubles in 15 years due to the solution of economic and engineering problems, the costs of launching OGAS outweighed 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 truncated form. Instead of introducing the National Automated Economic Management System, it was decided to focus on the development of a network of computer centers and the creation of automated control systems at individual enterprises. Ministries began to build their own computing centers for internal needs. In five years, the number of ICSs in the country increased 7 times, but it quickly became clear that industry ICSs used incompatible hardware and software, and were not linked by an interdepartmental network. All this infrastructure could not be combined into a single system.
Glushkov prepared an even more global project, which envisaged the appearance by 1990 of 200 centers for collective use in large cities, 2.5 thousand cluster centers for enterprises of one city or industry and 22.5 thousand centers for individual enterprises. OGAS 2.0 required 40 billion rubles.
Subsequent congresses of the CPSU repeatedly approved the updated versions of the OGAS, but attempts to create a single network did not reach the all-Union scale. For ten years, from 1976 to 1985, 21 shared computing centers were built in the country, which served 2 thousand enterprises. Attempts to network several centers remained at the experimental level. Remote user access did not work. Due to the poor quality of the channels, the connection was often interrupted and the operating system programs freeze. Users were forced to work with a large volume of punched cards and printouts - they could only dream about electronic data exchange.
The cybernetician noted that the Soviet statistics and planning bodies, even in the 1970s, were equipped with calculating and analytical machines of the 1939 model, by that time completely replaced in America by computers.
The project never found its “investor” in the person of the state, ready to invest in the development of infrastructure, as it was planned in OGAS.
Analyzing the reasons for the failures, Viktor Glushkov noted that the OGAS was much more complex than the nuclear or space research program. This frightened off officials. In addition, such a system could seriously affect the political and social aspects of life. In the era of stagnation, such a development of events was unacceptable.
A story has survived how, at one of the Politburo meetings, the Minister of Finance told about his trip to a poultry farm in Minsk, where the poultry women themselves "developed a computer" that "performed three programs": turned on music when the hen laid an egg, turned on and off the lights. “Egg production has increased, so all poultry farms in the Soviet Union need to be automated, and then think about all sorts of nonsense like the state system,” - this is how the historical anecdote ends, showing the conservative attitude of the bureaucracy towards innovation.
OGAS was partly the prototype of the Internet, but Glushkov himself understood this system as a kind of post-industrial society. It envisaged the creation of a powerful computer network throughout the country, 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, giving most of the operations to computers.
It is curious that Glushkov and his ideas were highly valued in the West. The scientist has traveled literally half the world. Encyclopedia Britannica ordered him an article on cybernetics, and the UN Secretary General appointed him as his adviser. The IBM management invited Glushkov to give lectures in the United States and even offered to take a high position in the field of development and research. He refused the last offer.
In 1982, Viktor Mikhailovich Glushkov died. The iPad, about which the "evangelist" of automation Glushkov wrote in the 1980s, was eventually created not in the USSR, but in the USA.
Author: Danil Churilo
