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USSR invented "internet" in terms of internal military network, but it had nothing in common with public packet-switching networks like in the West. Such networ
by thodin 6y ago
USSR invented "internet" in terms of internal military network, but it had nothing in common with public packet-switching networks like in the West.
Such networks were build in USSR only in late 80s - early 90s, some of them by western companies.
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.
- wwarner 6y agoI think this is interesting. The value of tcp/ip was the ability to form logical networks over and across existing physical/electronic networks. That only makes sense if you have an abundance of physical networks to start with.
- thodin 6y agoGlushkov was never about packet switching, he had an idea to build new dedicated physical network for this project, he estimated that this project will need more resources than nuclear and space program combined (!). It was actually a waste of materials, resources and completely incompetent. And access to that network was planned as very secure, even the project itself was partly top secret. In real world, we in USSR had very basic X.25 network (built by VNIIPAS - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VNIIPAS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VNIIPAS) in late 80s, with 2 links to Europe (via Finland and Austria) and X.25 network for universities (Akademset). They were many years behind even European networks and were built on very unreliable hardware. TCP/IP came to Russia only after 1991, no one actually used it before even for LANs (although it was available in stolen source code from BSD Unix).
- thrwway34 6y agoActually it appeared a little before 1991, in 1989. There was first Internet connection to Finland in Demos institute (their demos.su domain is still operational) and I can remember reading their Usenet posting about communist coup d'etat in 1991.
- thodin 6y agoDemos got their international UUCP connection only in 1990. In 1989 they were playing with Moscow-only UUCP network. Everything was dialup based. In 1991 they played with local TCP/IP in Moscow, in 1992 started to make dialup calls to Finland with SLIP instead of pure UUCP. Only in 1993 several permanent TCP/IP links from Russia (Demos, SOVAM Teleport, etc) to the West were finally established.
- thrwway34 6y agoAccording to their 'memoirs' they made a dialup connection to Finland in 1989: second link from 'History' https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOS_(ISP) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOS_(ISP)
- thodin 6y agoIn 1990, according to comment from Antonov. Please also check detailed history: http://ru.arf.ru/Hrono/index.html http://ru.arf.ru/Hrono/index.html 12-19 August 1990.