Internet-1964

The First National TV channel will show Internet-1964, its own 30-minute documentary production, on the eve of Glushkov’s anniversary. He was a cyberneticist, a founder of Ukrainian IT industry, personal computer designer, and the founder of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NASU)’s Institute of Cybernetics, now bearing his            name. The film will premiere at 12:30 p.m. on August 22.

Using highly innovative approaches, the scientist’s expertise was almost all-comprehensive, allowing him to deal with various fields of higher algebra, automata theory, economic cybernetics, artificial intelligence systems, etc. According to the documentary’s creator Andrii Dmytruk, its audience will discover hitherto unknown facets of Glushkov’s personality, for instance, learn about his unpublicized scientific inventions, such as a prototype of the modern Internet he proposed back in 1964. Actually, the film’s name comes from this fact.

“Academician Victor Glushkov proposed a fundamentally new framework for sharing and ordering information, which he called the Nationwide Automated System of the Information Collection and Processing for Accounting, Planning and Management of the Economy, or the NAS for short, in 1964. Of course, it would be more than just an Internet, as the academician wanted to not only establish inter-user communications, but to organize the automatic collection of data from all enterprises of the Soviet Union, too,” Dmytruk told The Day. “By the way, Glushkov’s plans were foiled by the top party leadership, because the project’s implementation would have been an irreversible blow to the bureaucracy’s omnipotence. In fact, the nation’s economy would have become more transparent. It envisaged enabling every shop or plant manager to get all information about their industry.”

“Academician Glushkov can be compared with Leonardo da Vinci in some regards, because he was many years ahead of his time. He was thinking globally and progressively,” the film’s director Lidia Antonenko commented for The Day. “Thirty years after his death, many of his designs remain classified. His research projects are still relevant to cybernetics. I think TV should cover people of this kind, while the modern Ukrainian TV often shows and glorifies the wrong people whose real importance cannot come even close to Glushkov’s. At the same time, there is a dearth of good films about the academician.”

The director told us that Internet-1964’s sources included Glushkov’s archive and memoirs of his friends and colleagues as well as the scientists who even now follow the academician’s example in their research.

Den, too, paid attention to the inventor’s 90th anniversary. The new issue of newspaper’s glossy supplement Route No. 1, entitled Ukrainians Who Have Changed the World, will carry an exclusive interview with his daughter Vira Glushkova, Candidate  of Sciences in Physics and Mathematics and a Senior Research Fellow at the NASU’s Glushkov Institute of Cybernetics. Route No. 1 will go on sale in newspaper kiosks on August 23, with online orders available on Den’s website.