Viktor Glushkov Proposes OGAS, a Soviet Computer Network

In 1962 Viktor Glushkov, director of the Institute of Cybernetics in Kyiv, proposed OGAS with Anatoly Kitov and others, a nationwide computer network to manage the Soviet command economy. At its most ambitious, up to twenty thousand computer centers were planned to feed several hundred regional centers and one center in Moscow.

Glushkov imagined OGAS, as a “brainlike” network. But the project would stall in bureaucratic limbo for nearly a decade.

It reached the Politburo on October 1, 1970, a year after ARPANET went online. The 1971 Party Congress even approved the network and 1,600 factory control systems but OGAS was stripped of its more experimental design, becoming a purely technical network.