This article is really a rather sloppy piece that contributes little to our understanding of what should be fascinating to this community: alternative histories

This article is really a rather sloppy piece that contributes little to our understanding of what should be fascinating to this community: alternative histories and possibilities of the computer. For example, how cybernetics and "use of the computer" are used almost interchangeably. A critique of cybernetics, which is in fact somewhere in-between a political program and philosophical system, can in no way be equated with a critique of the computer. In fact, a critique of cybernetics as at once idealist (vs materialist) and mechanistic (vs organic/vitalist) is a very sensible philosophical critique and in no way a contradictory legacy of mere soviet ideology, however philosophically problematic the latter may itself be. Many of the decisions to avoid anthropomorphizing the computer are similar to arguments put forth by Djikstra for perspective. Historically, how is it even possible that this article doesn't mention someone like Sergei Lebedev, a celebrated Soviet scientist, who had a working computer by the 50s which had been in development since the mid-to-late 40s? Or a figure like Victor Shestakov who independently made many of the same innovations as Claude Shannon? As a community, I think we should be very interested in other ways the computer could have been---at the level of use, hardware and software---thus histories like this or the Japanese http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer should be fascinating, even if one finds much about the Soviet Union problematic to say the least. On the cybernetics point, I would also highly recommend reading Bogdanov's science fiction novel Red Star, written in 1908 (obviously in-between the two revolutions, so technically pre-Soviet, but he was important in defining many philosophical and technical programs in the Soviet Union, notably space flight), for a fascinating account of a utopian intertwining of statistics, computer-like devices, and the life of a planet. Absolutely materialist and organic/vitalist rather than idealist and mechanistic!