A fascinating work of historical and cultural significance, Computing in Russia describes the history of Russian mechanical calculation devices. It focuses substantially on the first generations of military and civilian electronic computers, most of which were developed in the Soviet Union during the "Space-Race" and the Cold War, simultaneously with similarly fundamental developments in computing in the USA. The reader is introduced to computers and cybernetics from mathematical, technical, social and cultural perspectives ...
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A fascinating work of historical and cultural significance, Computing in Russia describes the history of Russian mechanical calculation devices. It focuses substantially on the first generations of military and civilian electronic computers, most of which were developed in the Soviet Union during the "Space-Race" and the Cold War, simultaneously with similarly fundamental developments in computing in the USA. The reader is introduced to computers and cybernetics from mathematical, technical, social and cultural perspectives through archive material and through texts by some of the pre-eminent veterans of Russian computing (historians, engineers, military historians). This alternative history and pre-history of information processing and of the computer ends with the adopting of the IBM standard and of Western technologies around 1970. In this book a critical part of Eastern European technological culture is (re-) discovered; at the same time, the reader is reminded of the alternatives to the Western hemisphere's concept of the computer, which are of decisive historical interest..
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