Personal Computing in the Soviet Era
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Contents | Zoom in | Zoom out For navigation instructions please click here Search Issue | Next Page Volume 37 Number 1 January–March 2015 www.computer.org Red Clones: Personal Computing in the Soviet Era Contents | Zoom in | Zoom out For navigation instructions please click here Search Issue | Next Page qM qMqM Previous Page | Contents |Zoom in | Zoom out | Front Cover | Search Issue | Next Page qMqM Qmags THE WORLD’S NEWSSTAND® IEEE Annals of the History of Computing Vol. 37, No. 1 Contentswww.computer.org/annals January–March 2015 From the Editor’s Desk 2 Nathan Ensmenger, Editor in Chief Red Clones: The Soviet Computer Hobby Movement 12 of the 1980s Zbigniew Stachniak History of Computing in India: 1955–2010 24 Vaidyeswaran Rajaraman Useful Instruction for Practical People: Early Printed 36 Discussions of the Slide Rule in the US Peggy Aldrich Kidwell The Production and Interpretation of ARPANET Maps 44 Bradley Fidler and Morgan Currie “There Is No Saturation Point in Education”: Inside IBM’s 56 Sales School, 1970s–1980s James W. Cortada For more information on computing topics, visit the Computer Society Digital Library at www.computer.org/csdl. Sergey Popov operating a Micro-80 computer at the Moscow Institute of Electronic Engineering in 1979. (Photograph courtesy of Sergey Popov.) Published by the IEEE Computer Society ISSN 1058-6180 qM qMqM Previous Page | Contents |Zoom in | Zoom out | Front Cover | Search Issue | Next Page qMqM Qmags THE WORLD’S NEWSSTAND® qM qMqM Previous Page | Contents |Zoom in | Zoom out | Front Cover | Search Issue | Next Page qMqM Qmags THE WORLD’S NEWSSTAND® Departments Editor in Chief Nathan Ensmenger 4 Interviews Associate Editors Dag Spicer David Hemmendinger, Marie Hicks Interview with Gordon Bell Christian Sandstrom,€ Jeffrey R. Yost 67 Biographies Department Editors Jack Copeland and Andre A. Haeff Luanne Johnson, Chigusa Kita, Irina Nikivincze, Andrew V. Haeff: Enigma of the Tube Era and Forgotten Andrew Russell, Dag Spicer, David Walden Computing Pioneer Editorial Board 75 Anecdotes Atsushi Akera, Gerard Alberts, William Aspray, Dan Murphy Martin Campbell-Kelly, Paul Ceruzzi, James W. Cortada, Peter Denning, TENEX and TOPS-20 David Alan Grier, Thomas Haigh, 83 Events and Sightings Ulf Hashagen, Peggy Aldrich Kidwell, Jennifer Light, Brian Randell, Thomas J. Misa Keith Smillie CBI–NSF Computer Security History Workshop Beatrice Choi Editorial Management: Cheryl Baltes SIGCIS at the 2014 SHOT Annual Meeting Director of Products and Services: Evan Butterfield Pierre Mounier-Kuhn Sr. Mgr., Editorial Services: Robin Baldwin History and Philosophy of Computing: New Seminars in France Editorial Product Lead: Bonnie Wylie Sr. Business Development Mgr.: Sandra Brown 87 Reviews Sr. Advertising Coordinator: Marian Anderson Digital State: The Story of Minnesota’s Computing Industry Magazine Operations Committee (reviewed by David C. Brock) Forrest Shull (chair), Brian Blake, Maria Ebling, Lieven Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife Eeckhout, Miguel Encarnacao, Nathan Ensmenger, Sumi Helal, (reviewed by Itamar Friedman) San Murugesan, Shari Lawrence Pfleeger, Yong Rui, Diomidis Spinellis, George K. Thiruvathukal, Mazin Yousif, Daniel Zeng Life Out of Sequence: A Data-Driven History of Bioinformatics (reviewed by Giuditta Parolini) Publications Board De la logique cable^ ´e au calculateur industriel. Une aventure du Jean-Luc Gaudiot (VP for Publications), Alain April, Alfredo Laboratoire d’Automatique de Grenoble Benso, Laxmi Bhuyan, Greg Byrd, Robert Dupuis, David S. (reviewed by Pierre Mounier-Kuhn) Ebert, Ming C. Lin, Linda I. Shafer, Forrest Shull, H.J. 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All submissions are subject to editing for style, clarity, and material on their own Web servers without permission, provided that the IEEE length. IEEE prohibits discrimination, harassment, and bullying. For more copyright notice and a full citation to the original work appear on the first screen of information, visit www.ieee.org/web/aboutus/whatis/policies/p9-26.html. qM qMqM Previous Page | Contents |Zoom in | Zoom out | Front Cover | Search Issue | Next Page qMqM Qmags THE WORLD’S NEWSSTAND® qM qMqM Previous Page | Contents |Zoom in | Zoom out | Front Cover | Search Issue | Next Page qMqM Qmags THE WORLD’S NEWSSTAND® From the Editor’s Desk Most histories of the personal computer have tradition- that slides rules became an important part of American ally focused on the United States (and to a much lesser mathematical practices. As with all of the history of degree Western Europe), but as Zbigniew Stachniak computing, the technology alone was not enough to reminds us in his cover article “Red Clones: Soviet Com- drive history: equally important were schools, text- puter Hobby Movement of the 1980s,” the personal books, educators, and manufacturers. computer attracted the attention of enthusiasts around The sketch map of the early ARPANET that first the globe. In the Soviet Union, electronics hobbyists appeared in 1969 has assumed iconic status among his- discovered the computer later than in the West, but torians and the public alike. It features in many a book, once they did they embraced it with enthusiasm. Fortu- website, documentary, and museum exhibit illustrating nately for them, the Soviet government approved of, the “origins of the Internet.” In their article on the pro- and in fact supported, microcomputer-oriented groups duction and interpretation of this and other ARPANET and publications, and by the early 1980s, there was a maps, Bradley Fidler and Morgan Currie trace the thriving computer hobbyist community in the USSR. assumptions, strategies, and meanings associated with In tracing the shift from indigenous, Soviet-built such representations. Like all maps, the ARPANET maps machines such as the Radio-86RK to the mass appeal of are historically situated documents; they cannot be ZX Spectrum clones, Stachniak provides an important seen as merely descriptive, but are intentionally contribution to the growing literature on the global his- designed to highlight and reinforce certain values. In tory of the personal computer. the case of the 1969 ARPANET map, for example, the In his overview of the history of computing in India visual representation emphasized decentralization and in the period 1955—2010, Vaidyeswaran Rajaraman equality among nodes, and it concealed hierarchies of extends our global perspective in a different direction. login access and the directionality of communications. His careful attention to the larger political economic There is a growing literature on the material culture of context of technological innovation reminds us that, as information, software, and other