Great Bleep Forward

Computers, said an official Soviet encyclopedia in 1955, are part of a "capitalist ploy used for increasing the exploitation of the working class by creating artificial redundancy and also loosening the revolutionary tie between the worker and the means of production." Times have changed. The Soviet Union is now rushing to wire its economy up to the computer, and the great bleep forward could open up enormous trade opportunities for Western computer firms.

The current five-year plan calls for investing more than $4 billion in computer technology−six times the amount in the last plan. By 1975, the Soviets aim to increase their stock of high-speed computers from about 7,000 to some 22,000. Even if that goal is met, the U.S.S.R. will have only about one-sixth as many of the machines as the U.S. has today. This year, the Soviets introduced a series of sophisticated computers called the Riad (Row) System, the first entirely new line since 1964. The Riad models are about the equal of the IBM System/360, which came out in the mid-1960s. Says Wade Holland, editor of the Rand Corp.'s Soviet Cybernetics Review: "The Soviet computer industry has always been a shambles."

Compared with Western models. Soviet computers tend to be slower, less reliable, and have less extensive memories. Russia's most widely used model still in production, the Minsk-32, can perform 100,000 operations a second and has a memory that accommodates 30,000 "bytes," or items of information. By contrast, the IBM System/370-135 can do 500,000 operations a second and retain up to 246,000 bytes. Only about 10% of Soviet computers are so-called third-generation, integrated-circuit models, and many are first-generation contraptions that use vacuum tubes, which were phased out in U.S. computers more than a decade ago. Soviet peripheral equipment and programming are also far cruder than in the West.

Why has the U.S.S.R. been so slow to computerize? The Soviets are adept at performing technological spectaculars−like orbiting a Sputnik−but inept at quality mass production and mass distribution. Computer Scientist Allen Reiter, who interviewed some 100 Soviet computer workers who have emigrated to Israel, concludes: "The Soviet mainframe industry is characterized by disjointedness. One plant keeps its work secret from another plant, and they come out with incompatible products." They are also weak on service. The Minsk enterprise, Russia's largest computer maker, began servicing its products only in 1970; before then, customers had to train their own maintenance men. Soviet managers still have little understanding of computers. Says the Rand Corp.'s Holland: "Factory managers think that all they have to do is plug them in like an electric fan."

Think Big. To meet their new goals, the Soviets may well have to buy much more Western equipment or even allow Western firms to set up plants there. The Soviets have bought about 100 Western computers, 21 of them from Britain's International Computers Ltd. But the Russians are beginning to prefer U.S. gear to European machines; they feel that American computer makers think on the same large scale as they do and have the technology to implement their thinking.