But when debated by Communist Party leaders, the finance minister stood up and announced that he was completely opposed to the idea. Machines could already be used to turn lights in hen houses on and off, he said. There was no need for a national network of them. It was rumoured that the finance minister was actually concerned about how OGAS would impact the balance of power between his ministry and the Central Statistical Agency (CSA).

Despite some support from other officials, Glushkov’s proposal was rejected. But his idea didn’t die – in fact, he battled on for another 12 years.

A few cities were linked up by small, local-area networks. And years later, when Guimaoutdinov was at university in Novosibirsk, he found a computer that had been connected directly to Moscow – more than 3000 kilometres away. “The cable was solid metal and pretty heavy,” he says. But it was a “patchwork”, not a network, says Peters.

Huge efforts also went into making computers to run these networks, according to Boris Malinovsky at the Viktor Glushkov Institute of Cybernetics in Ukraine, who has written several books – including one in English – about the Soviet computer industry. However, production was not always efficient or on schedule.

This contributed to concerns about the enormous costs involved in fully implementing OGAS. Some estimates put the price at 20 billion rubles – roughly $100 billion in today’s money. It may also have required a workforce of 300,000. For all of these reasons, the Soviet internet was never built.

One person who knows first-hand what it was like to work on Soviet-era network technology is Vladimir Kitov – Anatoly Kitov’s son. Vladimir Kitov now works at the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics in Moscow. But in the 1970s and 80s he wrote software for the military, which was used to help manage huge tank-building factories. He thinks that OGAS would have had a positive effect on the Soviet economy, as its early advocates had hoped.

Guimaoutdinov remembers lectures extolling the benefits such a network would bring. “It sounded really exciting, like there could be a huge efficiency in terms of fewer people involved in routine calculations, more precision,” he says. Better and more easily shared data may have helped officials run a closely managed economy.