Link title massively overreaches. Cybersyn was a few hundred telex machines, aka glorified telegraphs, and one computer that aggregated daily economic statistics. It was in no way comparable to ARPANET or the Internet. The project was an interesting yet abortive effort at top-down socialist economic management. Since it never had a chance to succeed or fail on its own merits, and also since it had a really swanky-looking operations room, it's been the subject of a boatload of techno-utopian projection. Here are reflections by someone who was directly involved:
>The emphasis of these reflections is in contrasting its rather limited achievements with its vision and relevance for our societies today. Its claims were large; it was presented as a project that achieved important results in a short period of time. The paper compares its actuality with these claims.
It's an early ERP system that existed under a different model of economic organization; omitting that serious detail is almost, er, underselling it.
Modern Free SocietiesTM lose their minds over networked water meters; this was a near-real-time index of important metrics from the country's important industries. The actually-Marxist government used this data to wage class war against the still-private owners of eg trucking companies. We don't hold with that sort of panopticon in the West, no sir!
...Regarding corporations, obviously. Citizens dutifully endure their smartphones and smartspeakers and smartdoorbells reporting important metrics to advertisers and Amazon and the cops. The point is that ideology colours everything.
The second video mentions a trucking strike, and that messages were passed between telex sites on alternate shipping options.
Supposedly, this was instrumental in breaking the strike, which was not instigated by the workers, but by the owners of the trucking firms, in reaction to a move towards nationalization of some of them.
When you boil it down to the details, Project Cybersyn really wasn't much. A lot of old telex stations, one mainframe, untested hand-wavey ideas about economic control theory, and some very nice Star Trek armchairs.
Even if they had had the tech: most projects fail, for one reason or another [*]. There has been another "internet", DECnet, but it lost. There's no reason to assume that Chile, not a country known for international influence and mastery of English, would have actually produced another internet.
Cybersyn looked like an innovative undertaking, though. A bit heavy on metaphors, it would appear from the article.
[*] edit: at becoming a success beyond its original domain.
I have to point out the public telephone company one in France: the Minitel [1]. This really could have achieved global interconnectivity, but for the stupidity of telephone companies.
Minitel was a terminal you could rent from the phone company, and its original intent was to reduce the need for human information operators. It was available in 1982. But it grew to have all sorts of services on it, even a dating service.
It wasn't a "fraction of a fraction of a fraction" of the population, either - there were millions in use. I saw one in 1989. I even mention Minitel in The Big Bucks (https://www.albertcory.io/the-big-bucks), only mildly satirically.
They "solved" the money problem: the charges would appear on your monthly phone bill. The execs were actually embarrassed that there were things like dating services -- that wasn't their plan at all.
So what do I mean by "the stupidity of telephone companies"? All the other phone companies in the world, who were already connected both physically and administratively (through CCITT) could have easily jumped on it and made their systems interoperate. They already did through phone calls and payments between each other.
They didn't see it, or if they did, they let the perfect be the enemy of the good. There were infinitely many papers on the "proper" way to do "videotex."
Would a global "internet" run by the phone companies be better than what we have? Discuss.
One thing I learned from Cliff Stoll's the cuckoo's egg is that the internet was far from the only computer network. Every country was building one or more networks. There was some kind of cambrian explosion of network technologys going on.
What the internet did was more subtle, but far more important: It standardized the technology, connecting these networks. Instead of tons of little private network, we got 1 global net owned by nobody.
I have no problem believing chile had one of these little private networks.
Isn't that the point? The Internet is an "inter-network", a network of networks.
But it wasn't even "The Internet", singular, to begin with. Any network of networks is "an internet". It's just when all the networks (or internetworks) are connected together (because Metcalfe's Law - the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users) that it becomes "The Internet".
A believe a large portion of this is thanks to Tim Berners-Lee, CERN, and the web. That was the free technology that made it immediately apparent how valuable a global internet is.
(Unfortunately, with social networks and chat systems and such opting out of federation and defaulting to closed ecosystems, I think we are moving toward independent corporate-sponsored networks, this time built on top of the global one.)
True. The web was built on top of the internet, which gave it a huge boost. Today, it's hard to separate the www and the internet, they seem almost 1 combined entity.
I wasn't there, but the internet presumably had value before the www, by having email, ftp and usenet.
It also demonstrates how futile nationalistic feelings are on computers. We invented the internet says the USA. We invented the www, says Europe. Both are irrelevant to the point they are almost wrong. The tech got valuable only because a planet worked together.
More specifically, Vint Cerf was one of the main guys who actually standardised the interconnectivity that made them all one internet in the first place
They didn't, though. They had a bunch of telex machines that were old even at the time. The title of this link is hyperbole to serve an ideological agenda. It's Teen Vogue tech history.
Before the Internet became widespread, people were using BBSs, and several large (for the time) networks of interconnections between them. Fidonet, and many more regional ones like Z-Netz. There were also networks for businesses and research institutions that were not the Internet. None of these were just a bunch of Telex machines, even if the network in the article was.
The most horrifying thing about the "Computer-generated image of Project CyberSyn operations room" on the Project Cybersyn Wikipedia page is that they're displaying the lyrics of RMS's Free Software Song (which he wrote in 1991) on the fake monitors in the "Close Up of the Data Feed":
SHARE THE SOFTWARE
## YOU'LL BE FREE JOIN US NOW AND SHARE THE SOFTWARE
## HACKER YOU'LL BE FREE HACKER YOU'LL BE FREE
JOIN US NOW
## JOIN US NOW }
}
#### }
#### YOU'LL BE FREE } JOIN US NOW AND SHARE THE SOFTWARE
#### HACKER }
#### }
}
## YOU'LL BE FREE JOIN US NOW
## HACKER
## YOU'LL BE FREE
## HACKER
## JOIN US NOW
## YOU'LL BE FREE
## HACKER
Eden Medina's Cybernetic Revolutionaries is a good resource on this topic.
The way it worked beginning in the 80s was that once you had your local in-country research network, you eventually felt compelled to hook it up to NSFNET (maybe after starting out with an email gateway into ARPANET/CSNET). So it's likely that there would have been just one Internet anyway.
Does anyone actually have details about the project?
Skimming the wikipage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn the networking side of things is rather primitive: a single master node talking to a number of child nodes with no other inter node communication. And a lot of software build in the master node to review what is happening in the child nodes. Nothing mentioned packets, routing, or any of the other more interesting bits of what made the original internet different.
Down the wikihole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OGAS seems like the arpanet not taken, 10 years before arpanet with the same design goals of inter node communication.
>Serendipitously, we found a large number of spare telex machines in one of the state-owned enterprises. Their installation followed in plants and enterprises throughout the country, as well as in industrial committees, CORFO and other government offices. A telex room with tens of machines was installed at CORFO. In practice, it was an operations room for the state-owned industry that offered an incipient nervous system for the industrial economy; it was called Cybernet
The telex itself was not invented in Chile, but rather ironically in 1930s Germany:
Readit News
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
Link title massively overreaches. Cybersyn was a few hundred telex machines, aka glorified telegraphs, and one computer that aggregated daily economic statistics. It was in no way comparable to ARPANET or the Internet. The project was an interesting yet abortive effort at top-down socialist economic management. Since it never had a chance to succeed or fail on its own merits, and also since it had a really swanky-looking operations room, it's been the subject of a boatload of techno-utopian projection. Here are reflections by someone who was directly involved:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290742382_Cyberneti...
>The emphasis of these reflections is in contrasting its rather limited achievements with its vision and relevance for our societies today. Its claims were large; it was presented as a project that achieved important results in a short period of time. The paper compares its actuality with these claims.
It’s not particularly exciting but it was a practical idea.
Modern Free SocietiesTM lose their minds over networked water meters; this was a near-real-time index of important metrics from the country's important industries. The actually-Marxist government used this data to wage class war against the still-private owners of eg trucking companies. We don't hold with that sort of panopticon in the West, no sir!
...Regarding corporations, obviously. Citizens dutifully endure their smartphones and smartspeakers and smartdoorbells reporting important metrics to advertisers and Amazon and the cops. The point is that ideology colours everything.
Try to calculate if Germany will run out of gas this winter. You can't . Because economy is not centrally planned.
Supposedly, this was instrumental in breaking the strike, which was not instigated by the workers, but by the owners of the trucking firms, in reaction to a move towards nationalization of some of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex#Development
When you boil it down to the details, Project Cybersyn really wasn't much. A lot of old telex stations, one mainframe, untested hand-wavey ideas about economic control theory, and some very nice Star Trek armchairs.
Cybersyn looked like an innovative undertaking, though. A bit heavy on metaphors, it would appear from the article.
[*] edit: at becoming a success beyond its original domain.
Deleted Comment
Minitel was a terminal you could rent from the phone company, and its original intent was to reduce the need for human information operators. It was available in 1982. But it grew to have all sorts of services on it, even a dating service.
It wasn't a "fraction of a fraction of a fraction" of the population, either - there were millions in use. I saw one in 1989. I even mention Minitel in The Big Bucks (https://www.albertcory.io/the-big-bucks), only mildly satirically.
They "solved" the money problem: the charges would appear on your monthly phone bill. The execs were actually embarrassed that there were things like dating services -- that wasn't their plan at all.
So what do I mean by "the stupidity of telephone companies"? All the other phone companies in the world, who were already connected both physically and administratively (through CCITT) could have easily jumped on it and made their systems interoperate. They already did through phone calls and payments between each other.
They didn't see it, or if they did, they let the perfect be the enemy of the good. There were infinitely many papers on the "proper" way to do "videotex."
Would a global "internet" run by the phone companies be better than what we have? Discuss.
[1] https://history-computer.com/minitel/
A global network run by The Phone Company (TPC) was the subject of "The President's Analyst":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_President%27s_Analyst
The President's Analyst - The Phone Company:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2NNZdigSXg
The President's Analyst - Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V63yeIIEd6k
Murder of a Movie - How J. Edgar Hoover Killed "The President's Analyst":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwM4Solrzes
What the internet did was more subtle, but far more important: It standardized the technology, connecting these networks. Instead of tons of little private network, we got 1 global net owned by nobody.
I have no problem believing chile had one of these little private networks.
But it wasn't even "The Internet", singular, to begin with. Any network of networks is "an internet". It's just when all the networks (or internetworks) are connected together (because Metcalfe's Law - the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users) that it becomes "The Internet".
(Unfortunately, with social networks and chat systems and such opting out of federation and defaulting to closed ecosystems, I think we are moving toward independent corporate-sponsored networks, this time built on top of the global one.)
I wasn't there, but the internet presumably had value before the www, by having email, ftp and usenet.
It also demonstrates how futile nationalistic feelings are on computers. We invented the internet says the USA. We invented the www, says Europe. Both are irrelevant to the point they are almost wrong. The tech got valuable only because a planet worked together.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vint_Cerf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn#/media/File:C...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sJUDx7iEJwhttps://www.gnu.org/music/free-software-song.en.html
https://www.gnu.org/music/writing-fs-song.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
The CyberSyn multimedia "reconstruction":
https://web.archive.org/web/20070716014045/http://www.cybers...
The way it worked beginning in the 80s was that once you had your local in-country research network, you eventually felt compelled to hook it up to NSFNET (maybe after starting out with an email gateway into ARPANET/CSNET). So it's likely that there would have been just one Internet anyway.
Skimming the wikipage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn the networking side of things is rather primitive: a single master node talking to a number of child nodes with no other inter node communication. And a lot of software build in the master node to review what is happening in the child nodes. Nothing mentioned packets, routing, or any of the other more interesting bits of what made the original internet different.
Down the wikihole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OGAS seems like the arpanet not taken, 10 years before arpanet with the same design goals of inter node communication.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290742382_Cyberneti...
>Serendipitously, we found a large number of spare telex machines in one of the state-owned enterprises. Their installation followed in plants and enterprises throughout the country, as well as in industrial committees, CORFO and other government offices. A telex room with tens of machines was installed at CORFO. In practice, it was an operations room for the state-owned industry that offered an incipient nervous system for the industrial economy; it was called Cybernet
The telex itself was not invented in Chile, but rather ironically in 1930s Germany:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex#Development