Apollo Guidance Computer History Project

First conference

July 27, 2001

Slava Gerovitch's introduction

SLAVA GEROVITCH: My name is Slava Gerovitch. I am a post-doctoral fellow at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology down the road. I'll be joining this project next month. I'll be working partly on the American story, and partly on the Russian side of the story.

My own research interests have been in the history of Soviet cybernetics. As you know, in the Soviet case, cybernetics was a much broader term than here, and it embraced all sorts of computer applications, including all sorts of computer applications within the Soviet space program. And actually the things that you are doing here, in the Soviet Union would have fallen under the rubric of space cybernetics.

I've just finished a book on the history of Soviet cybernetics which is coming out in the next year with MIT Press. In the book, I cover mostly computer models and applications in fields like biology, physiology and linguistics; as for the space program, I'm only beginning to work on it.

So I would greatly appreciate any leads, or any reminiscences of your contacts with your Russian colleagues either at the time you worked there, or maybe afterwards. Any smallest detail which may look very insignificant to you may actually lead to something bigger and significant for me. So any smallest fact and detail would be appreciated.

I would suggest to look broadly, not only at the specific differences in technical design, but also at the differences in institutional cultures, in the ways in which research has borrowed certain techniques and methods from other fields. Russians may have looked at different examples on which to model their work than you did.

I also look at some political contexts, and broad ideological issues, since my own work concerns periods starting from the last Stalinist periods, from the Khrushchev periods, from the early Brezhnev period. All of these periods were very different ideological situations, different Soviet attitudes towards what computers could do, and whether you could trust them, what exactly functions could be transferred to computers, what exactly functions should be retained and given to human cosmonauts.

So I look forward to exploring the Soviet side of the story, and as I said, I will also be helping David and Sandy with the American side.

John Tylko's introduction

site last updated 12-08-2002 by Alexander Brown