In How Not to Network a Nation, Benjamin Peters points out that Soviet computer networking projects failed partially due to this same centralizing idealism. Soviet networking projects all saw the ideal network as a central nervous system, connecting productive outposts with the central “brain” in Moscow. By contrast, the developers of ARPANET envisioned their network as a brain with the individual computers as the neurons. The formulation of ARPANET was as a distribution of homogeneous elements, whereas the formulation of the OGAS (the largest Soviet project) was hierarchical and heterogeneous from the start. It’s interesting to see the similarities between all of these unsuccessful networking projects.
In How Not to Network a Nation, Benjamin Peters points out that Soviet computer networking projects failed partially due to this same centralizing idealism. Soviet networking projects all saw the ideal network as a central nervous system, connecting productive outposts with the central “brain” in Moscow. By contrast, the developers of ARPANET envisioned their network as a brain with the individual computers as the neurons. The formulation of ARPANET was as a distribution of homogeneous elements, whereas the formulation of the OGAS (the largest Soviet project) was hierarchical and heterogeneous from the start. It’s interesting to see the similarities between all of these unsuccessful networking projects.