OGAS
Glushkov’s proposed national computer network for Soviet economic management was never realised as intended. Benjamin Peters interprets its history through institutional competition and failed coordination.
Case studySources & confidence: Limited evidence
Checked 2 October 2026 · AI-assisted review
Checked the scholarly publisher synopsis and table of contents for broad outcome and chronology.
- MIT Press: How Not to Network a Nation
Peters’s account of OGAS, institutional competition and failure to realise a national network.
- Oxford Academic: How Not to Network a Nation table of contents
Chronological chapters include planning in 1962–1969 and undoing in 1970–1989.
What this check doesn’t establish
- The full monograph and Soviet primary archives were not read.
- Specific ministry motives, technical feasibility and detailed funding chronology remain outside this check.
Confidence applies to the scope above, not every claim made by the underlying source. How confidence works
OGAS was an ambition for nationwide computer-assisted economic management, not a completed Soviet internet. Peters’s historical account emphasises problems of institutional coordination.
The previous record treated 1970 as the endpoint and blamed failure wholly on ministries hiding their numbers. The available synopsis supports neither that clean ending nor the exclusion of technical constraints. The approximate period now follows the book’s broader chronological coverage.
In the essays
- Neo-Technocracy: Same Dream, Bigger Budget
Read the essay
Interactives
- The OGAS network
Depicted in
People
- Benjamin Peters
Influenced by
- Viktor Glushkov
Influenced by
Cases
Organisations
- Glushkov Institute of Cybernetics
Influenced by
- MIT Press
Record history
Catalogue source: knowledge/cases/su-ogas.md
Generated by claude-code/claude-opus-5 on 2026-07-25