13 COMMUNIST COMPUTERS

The vast majority of Soviet managers and administrators had little or no perception of the practical and potential value of computers. — Seymour E. Goodman, 1979
1
The Cold War hung over billions of people like a dark cloud. It had started secretly during World War II when the Soviet Union and the Allies lined up on opposite sides to shape the postwar world with rival brands of a global order and did not end until the Soviet Empire imploded in 1989. In the intervening nearly half century, the world came close to nuclear holocaust several times, while both sides fought numerous surrogate ground wars in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Both sides monitored and controlled what companies could buy and sell to each other, because they were always concerned about espionage and the exchange of technologies that might provide military advantages to the other side. For example, Polish computer users liked British technologies, and Soviet officials thought Poles and East Germans might share communist computer architectures with the West. The Russians sold a handful of machines to the West, largely through Finland, but the majority of sales went from West to East. Charles de Gaulle's clash with the government of the United States over a French effort to acquire a CDC computer was typical of much larger forces at work that shadowed the activities of IBM and other large corporations around the world.