Despite the omnipresence of computers in modern societyThe vast majority of students today they never study computer science or programming. Those exposed to these topics often learn low-level skills rather than embark on a deeper exploration of computational concepts or theory.
In previous decades, some countries promoted computer science education at the national level. In the 1980s, for example, the British government launched a popular and quite successful initiative that took thousands of BBC Micro to the classrooms. But the most ambitious computer literacy program ever conceived is one you’ve probably never heard of, and it originated in one place: the sovietic Union.
Maybe you’re smiling remembering the old milestone that the USSR invented Tetris and, nevertheless, it lost the Cold War (or so we have been told…). It is true that the Soviet government never adopted a national computer network or provided its citizens with affordable personal computers. But if you subscribe to this narrative of technological stumbles and political failures, you are missing an important partfascinating, if not to say, history of global computerization.
The beginning of computer literacy in the USSR
This is a story in which some Soviet teenagers got hooked on a popular sci-fi novel of adventure and self-discovery and taught themselves and others to program using the only means available: the programmable calculator.
In September 1985the ninth graders of the USSR began to study a new subject: “Fundamentals of computer science and computer technology”. The implementation of this compulsory subject, which aimed to make programming a universal skill, was going to be accompanied by new textbooks in 15 national languagesthe training of some 100,000 teachers and one million computers for nearly 60,000 schools averages of the Soviet republics.
None of this was easy. The state did not provide equipment to schools, efforts to print and distribute textbooks were uneven, and many teachers never received the necessary training.
Meanwhile, this move sparked an international debate among computer experts about the very definition of “computer literacy.” American computer scientist and businessman edward fredkin he argued that his country’s experience should inform the Soviets:
In response, computer scientist Andrei Ershov he joked that coding and typing were not mutually exclusive. Ershov directed the “Akademgorodok Computer Center“, in the Siberian scientific city of Akademgorodok, and had become the main promoter of the computer literacy campaign. In stark contrast to Fredkin, Ershov saw computer literacy as nurturing a set of intellectual habits, which he called “algorithmic thinking“.
This idea arose in part from the time that Ershov was a student of Aleksei Lyapunova leading figure in the cybernetics soviet From Lyapunov, Ershov learned to think in terms of cybernetic metaphors and to make connections between technology and society. he conceived the algorithms as a form of communication between humans and machines. Ershov was also inspired by the ideas of the West.
In September 1958, was part of an elite group of Soviet computer experts who met with their American counterparts. The exchange of him with the computer pioneer Alan Pearlswho would later become the first recipient of the Turing Award, turned out to be particularly fruitful. Perlis shared with Ershov his enthusiasm for developing a universal algorithmic language, called Algolwhose goal was to make the software portable and international.
Ershov made the Algol program his own and went on to develop one of the most ambitious compilers for the language in the early 1960s. The universalist aspirations of the Algol community would influence his views on computer education.
Ershov’s educational agenda was also inspired by a visit to MIT to early 1970swhere he met Seymour Papert and learned about his computer education experiments with Logo, a programming language designed to be used by children.
However, although Ershov closely followed developments in Western computing, he believed that the Soviet Union should forge its own path towards the age of informationone imbued with socialist values, less dependent on computers as black-box products and more focused on creating skills and mental habits of citizens.
learning to program, he argued, students would develop abstract reasoning and a problem-solving mindset. By the end of the 1970s, Ershov and his Akademgorodok team had formulated their literacy program, developing their curriculum with the help of Siberian students and testing it in local schools.
Of course, Ershov knew that he needed much broader support to implement such a curriculum nationally. He began tirelessly promoting his idea of programming as a “second literacy” to Soviet authorities, computer experts, educators, parents and children, as well as the international community. Finally, in 1985in a wave of transformative policies adopted with the coming to power of Mikhail Gorbachevofficially adopted the computer science curriculum Akademgorodok.
Why use calculators instead of computers to study computer science?
The ineffectiveness of Soviet planning and economy meant that most ninth graders will study the curriculum without computers with which to test their new knowledge. This was not seen as an obstacle by the reformers. On the contrary, the didactic material encouraged writing programs on paper and performing imaginative exercises.
Pupils, for example, played the role of a robot named Dezhurik (from the Russian word dezhurnyi, the person responsible for the maintenance of the classroom), who was programmed to “close the window” or “clean the blackboard”. When students in the remote city of Khabarovsk complained about the lack of computers in classrooms, Ershov praised them for taking the initiative to write, stressing that young people still had a chance to “catch the train of the future.”
But he refused to sympathize with them. What they were learning—how to devise an algorithm and write a program for it—was the bottom line, he said, regardless of whether they ever ran the program on a real computer.
Soviet citizens may not have had access to personal computers, but many millions of them did have access to computing devices, in the form of programmable scientific calculators. These portable devices could store instructions and numbers in memory for later execution. Popular in the West after the 1974 introduction of the Hewlett-Packard HP-65programmable calculators still have their fans and their uses.
In the Soviet Union, beginning in the mid-1970s, the microelectronics industry produced millions of electronic calculators, primarily for the use of what was then the largest population of engineers in the world. As in the West, Soviet calculator users were instrumental in developing programs and applications for these devices.
Unlike the West, few Soviets had personal computersso the calculator took on many more functions, including as an impromptu computer platform for computer science education and a flourishing gaming culture.
These two functions came together in a popular science magazine called Tekhnika Molodezhi (Technology for Youth), published by the communist youth organization Komsomol. The publication was aimed at teenagers and had 1.5 million subscribers. In January 1985, the magazine endorsed Ershov’s computer literacy campaign and began devoting a section to programming with the most popular Soviet calculator, the Elektronika B3-34, which was sold for 85 rubles. However, reader response to the column was disappointing…
space travel novels
In August 1985TM (Tekhnika Molodezhi) started serializing the space travel novel “Kon-Tiki: A Path to Earth”. In this epic quest story, an engineer and a pilot try against all odds to fly a lunar lander from the Moon to Earth. The premise of the novel was the popular American computer game lunar lander, in which players controlled thrusters and calculated trajectories to safely guide their landers to the lunar surface. The Soviet version was called Lunalet.
The Kon-Tiki serial was an immediate success, and the magazine soon became one of the most prominent forums for younger users of programmable calculators. The futuristic narrative of each chapter was combined with puzzles about the physical laws of space travel and tricks to program the B3-34. But what kept readers reading was the novel’s dramatic plot and focus on pushing human and technological limits.
Kon-Tiki, a reference to the raft trip of Thor Heyerdahl in 1947 across the Pacific Ocean, was also the name of the small ship chosen by the protagonists of the novel for their trip to Earth. The plot evolved far beyond the original goal of the game, which was to land the ship. The “road to Earth” became a journey of self-discovery.
The heroes stumble even at the novel’s conclusion: They make it to Earth only to land in the ocean and are forced to send out an SOS.
The merit of the intelligent combination of programming and narration of the novel corresponds to its author, Mikhail Pukhov, who was also the editor of the science fiction section of TM. The son of a prominent mathematician, Pukhov graduated from the country’s most prestigious engineering school, the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Abandoning a promising career at the Central Institute for Scientific Research and Radioengineering, he devoted himself to writing and editing.
Before starting Kon-Tiki, Pukhov thoroughly explored the calculator’s functions, as well as its flaws. Users of calculators, both in the West and in the East, were quick to discover and exploit the undocumented features of the devices, pushing them to do things their designers never intended. This exploration became known as errorologyby the message “EГГОГ” which frequently appeared on the small screen while executing an undocumented function. Pukhov’s novel glorified errorology with poetic descriptions of “fishing” for unusual combinations of symbols.
And readers responded, writing to TM about their own calculator exploits. Having their programs and names printed on the TM was the ultimate aspiration of many readers.
How did calculators influence the hacker world?
Thus, TM and its science fiction publisher helped cultivate a generation of hackers and computer enthusiasts. If it seems strange to you that a major state-sanctioned Soviet magazine promoted hacking practices, consider How the hacker culture emerged in the United Statesas a form of practical technological research.
In his 1984 book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Steven Levy traced the origin of the MIT hackers to a railroad hobbyist club. Similarly, in the Soviet Union, a combination of state interests and popular initiatives had nurtured a practical culture among radio amateurs. For a radio engineer like Pukhov, as well as educators using the novel in classrooms, subverting the calculator’s design specifications was a way to foster technical skills.
The community of readers and gamers that grew up around Kon-Tiki unknowingly endorsed the goals of programming literacy conceived by Ershov. In their letters to TM, many asked for more games, as well as flowcharts for rewriting the programs for other types of calculators.
In this sense, the novel and its community of calculator users contributed to the spread of Ershov’s vision of computer literacy.
But, Was Ershov’s Curriculum a Success? The results of any educational initiative are, of course, difficult to gauge. To be sure, Soviet statisticians somewhat oversaw the reform effort, but such data would hardly capture real-world experiences in the classroom and beyond.
We have posted on various Russian calculator user forums hoping to hear from “Kon-Tikireaders”. The responses we received were tinged with nostalgia. Some wrote that their fascination with the novel prompted them to get a calculator.
For others, the calculator was just a springboard; over time they earned enough money to buy computer kits (available in perestroika-era street markets) and assemble their own machines. Meanwhile, copies of TM continued to circulate in thrift stores, where new groups of readers discovered the novel long after its original publication. Electronic versions of the magazine are now easily found on the Internet, along with calculator emulators.
It is less clear to what extent these school experiences influenced people’s professional lives. Unless you have lived through it, you cannot fully appreciate the enormous upheaval of the economic crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in Russia, those years are known as “The wild 1990s“.
Kon-Tiki readers came of age as citizens of emerging sovereign states. Few of them had complete control over their career options, and for many, coding became a calling, a job, and a gateway. Today, in Russia, “universality” of programming knowledge is no longer associated with creating a computer-literate society. Rather, it raises the prospect of migration, as skilled programmers decide to leave the country to pursue their careers.
Soviet-era efforts to foster computer literacy shed a different light on Western assumptions about the age of information. Unlike what happened in the West, the Soviet digital revolution was not the work of geeks and geniuses, but of state-sponsored scholars, writers, and educators, who worked with government officials, industrialists, and programmers in pursuit of a common goal. It was not based on the personal computer, but settled for calculators, pencil and paper, and the students’ own imagination.
Despite the passion of digital enthusiasts like Ershov and Pukhov, the ideal of universality of the campaign was elusive. The reform seemed to work best where it was expected, in elite schools in the capitals and in some remote schools blessed with wealthy patrons, such as those supported by the oil and gas industry.
TM transcended some geographic and economic barriers and provided a motivation, an entry point, and a community for students who lacked inspiring teachers or computers of their own. Nevertheless, the magazine failed to overcome another well-known division: that of the genre. Unlike the population of professional Soviet programmers, and unlike the gender-neutral mandatory computer science classes, the readers who wrote to TM about their calculator exploits were predominantly male.
Neither Ershov, who died in 1988, nor the country itself survived long enough for the experiment to run its course. However, we should not too quickly dismiss a view of computer literacy that viewed all students as capable of algorithmic thinking. The Soviets did not prefigure the many challenges of the information age. But what you decide to remember from the computing past can help determine how to solve current puzzles.