I wish the Soviets had focused more on developing an independent computer industry and their own distinct flavors of programming languages. Imagine the thrill of studying languages built to run on completely separate hardware architectures, featuring entirely novel paradigms and structures. This would be the closest thing to experience reverse-engineering a computer from an alien spaceship.
But they simply weren't able to sustain it. In the West, while the military industry initially pushed computer development, private companies quickly adapted those technologies for the consumer market. Over time, the Western consumer market became vastly larger than the military one. In the USSR, this cross-pollination wasn't possible because anything that even touched the military was immediately classified as a sta…
1. how far behind the West it was, and
2. that there were no other secrets