81–90 of 187 posts
Even PSTN was unreliable, mostly analogue, SS7 was never implemented on 99% of intercity links.
Glushkov never produced any working model of his "network", they had no protocols, no software, no hardware.
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Somewhat related, Netheads vs. Bellheads https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/ I briefly worked at a place fully dominated by Bellheads early in my career. They were bemoaning IP and holding on to ATM stuff as late as 2001. I'm told that the last of their tribe (after I left) fought off VoIP as a passing fad well into the 2000s.
Hard to believe this was nearly a quarter century ago. T he references are getting dated: > "How do you scare a Bellhead?" he begins. "First, show them something like RealAudio or IPhone. Then tell them that right now performance is bandwidth-limited, but that additional infrastructure is being deployed." > … > One result is undergrads who, for $29.95 a month, clog up the Internet with CU-SeeMe sessions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Somewhat related, Netheads vs. Bellheads https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/ I briefly worked at a place fully dominated by Bellheads early in my career. They were bemoaning IP and holding on to ATM stuff as late as 2001. I'm told that the last of their tribe (after I left) fought off VoIP as a passing fad well into the 2000s.
Hard to believe this was nearly a quarter century ago. T he references are getting dated: > "How do you scare a Bellhead?" he begins. "First, show them something like RealAudio or IPhone. Then tell them that right now performance is bandwidth-limited, but that additional infrastructure is being deployed." > … > One result is undergrads who, for $29.95 a month, clog up the Internet with CU-SeeMe sessions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's extremely anti-soviet, almost propagandistically so. It wouldnt be out of place as a work made at the request of Voice of America, although the author is an Englishman.
Shocking that a regime in which, "the communist leaders of the Soviet Union were responsible for no fewer than 15 million deaths." could be painted in a bad light. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_...
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I fail to see how magic advanced computer power would solve the problem of economic calculation in the socialist commonwealth. Without prices there is no efficient distribution of resources.
The same way they do so within a single sufficiently large corporation, and the same way the market utterly fails in such a situation. See https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4385-failing-to-plan-how-ay...
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> Soviet bureaucracy wanted to transform Quite the opposite: soviet bureaucracy didn't want to transform anything, they were more concerned with maintaining the status quo for as long as they could. This is why the system turned out to be too rigid to withstand the pressures of the modern world. On the other hand, think about how much the planned economy would benefit from the wide-spread automation and access to mod…
What would planned economy do with hands not needed anymore? :) Even with totally unproductive economy, USSR had lots and lots of bullshit jobs just to keep people employed. What would USSR do with tons of unemployed people? Create fake jobs? Or what... let people find out what they'd like to do and let them start private initiatives?!?
It would have been so cool if the USSR had its own internet and shared it with China and China were still running it now because wouldn't it be great to stop hearing about how people think firewalling the entire Chinese IP space will keep hackers out. Also a parallel internet built on something other than TCP/IP would promote competition to see which internet design is technically superior. But realistically nobody w…
ARPANET by contrast started from the bottom and worked up. This is crucial because it makes it easy to iterate on the design until you get it right. With a top down design mistakes get baked in and become nearly impossible to correct.
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“In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” - Orson Welles, The Third Man, 1949 Ancient Greece was also exceptionally politically unstable and yet produced the fou…
Meanwhile, Switzerland got a three-peat of Nobel Prizes in Medicine in 1948, 1949, and 1950. It makes sense that a guy like Welles would value art and throw scorn on technology. Stability is necessary for investment and the build-up of capital; it isn't necessary to make a painting.
Assuming Nobel prize work is likely a decade or more in the making, I'm thinking all their European competition was busy trying to stay alive?