"The Cold War for Information Technology is a captivating new book that uncovers a little-known but vital battle to gain control over IT development that took place in the final two decades of the 20th century. As you might expect, intelligence agencies from the United States, the Soviet Union, India, and China all played major roles. However, remarkably, an IT company from Tito's unaligned Yugoslavia called Iskra Delta wound up right in the middle of this epic struggle to control IT. For despite its small size, Iskra Delta obtained permission from the U.S. to work through the U.S. embargo that at the time prohibited exporting information technology to the East. Being at a kind of digital crossroads for the East and West gave the company a massive influence that belied its small size. By 1986 the tiny Yugoslav IT company had built one of the largest computer networks in the world for the Chinese police. But Iskra Delta's innovativeness would ultimately draw it into the center of the international struggle to control the emerging IT world with presidents of the Soviet Union, China and India personally paying a visit. Suddenly the company was in the crosshairs of international intelligence agencies like the CIA and the KGB. Author Janez Skrubej was managing Iskra Delta during the time all of this was taking place and witnessed The Cold War for Information Technology first hand. This book is his story. Janez Skrubej is a retired IT professional and MIT alumnus who lives in the picturesque village of Rudolfovo, Slovenia. When he is not writing, Janez enjoys keeping up with the latest IT news and making his own plum brandy. Publisher's website: http: //sbpra.com/JanezSkrubej"

The Cold War for Information Technology is a captivating new book that uncovers a little-known but vital battle to gain control over IT development that took place in the final two decades of the 20th century. As you might expect, intelligence agencies from the United States, the Soviet Union, India, and China all played major roles. However, remarkably, an IT company from Tito's unaligned Yugoslavia called Iskra Delta wound up right in the middle of this epic struggle to control IT. For despite its small size, Iskra Delta obtained permission from the U.S. to work through the U.S. embargo that.

The Closed World offers a radically new alternative to the canonical histories of computers and cognitive science. Arguing that we can make sense of computers as tools only when we simultaneously grasp their roles as metaphors and political icons, Paul Edwards shows how Cold War social and cultural contexts shaped emerging computer technology--and were transformed, in turn, by information machines. The Closed World explores three apparently disparate histories--the history of American global power, the history of computing machines, and the history of subjectivity in science and culture--through the lens of the American political imagination. In the process, it reveals intimate links between the military projects of the Cold War, the evolution of digital computers, and the origins of cybernetics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence. Edwards begins by describing the emergence of a "closed-world discourse" of global surveillance and control through high-technology military power. The Cold War political goal of "containment" led to the SAGE continental air defense system, Rand Corporation studies of nuclear strategy, and the advanced technologies of the Vietnam War. These and other centralized, computerized military command and control projects--for containing world-scale conflicts--helped closed-world discourse dominate Cold War political decisions. Their apotheosis was the Reagan-era plan for a " Star Wars" space-based ballistic missile defense. Edwards then shows how these military projects helped computers become axial metaphors in psychological theory. Analyzing the Macy Conferences on cybernetics, the Harvard Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory, and the early history of artificial intelligence, he describes the formation of a "cyborg discourse." By constructing both human minds and artificial intelligences as information machines, cyborg discourse assisted in integrating people into the hyper-complex technological systems of the closed world. Finally, Edwards explores the cyborg as political identity in science fiction--from the disembodied, panoptic AI of 2001: A Space Odyssey, to the mechanical robots of Star Wars and the engineered biological androids of Blade Runner--where Information Age culture and subjectivity were both reflected and constructed. Inside Technology series

Investigations of how the global Cold War shaped national scientific and technological practices in fields from biomedicine to rocket science. The Cold War period saw a dramatic expansion of state-funded science and technology research. Government and military patronage shaped Cold War technoscientific practices, imposing methods that were project oriented, team based, and subject to national-security restrictions. These changes affected not just the arms race and the space race but also research in agriculture, biomedicine, computer science, ecology, meteorology, and other fields. This volume examines science and technology in the context of the Cold War, considering whether the new institutions and institutional arrangements that emerged globally constrained technoscientific inquiry or offered greater opportunities for it. The contributors find that whatever the particular science, and whatever the political system in which that science was operating, the knowledge that was produced bore some relation to the goals of the nation-state. These goals varied from nation to nation; weapons research was emphasized in the United States and the Soviet Union, for example, but in France and China scientific independence and self-reliance dominated. The contributors also consider to what extent the changes to science and technology practices in this era were produced by the specific politics, anxieties, and aspirations of the Cold War. Contributors Elena Aronova, Erik M. Conway, Angela N. H. Creager, David Kaiser, John Krige, Naomi Oreskes, George Reisch, Sigrid Schmalzer, Sonja D. Schmid, Matthew Shindell, Asif A. Siddiqi, Zuoyue Wang, Benjamin Wilson

Investigations of how the global Cold War shaped national scientific and technological practices in fields from biomedicine to rocket science. The Cold War period saw a dramatic expansion of state-funded science and technology research. Government and military patronage shaped Cold War technoscientific practices, imposing methods that were project oriented, team based, and subject to national-security restrictions. These changes affected not just the arms race and the space race but also research in agriculture, biomedicine, computer science, ecology, meteorology, and other fields. This volume examines science and technology in the context of the Cold War, considering whether the new institutions and institutional arrangements that emerged globally constrained technoscientific inquiry or offered greater opportunities for it. The contributors find that whatever the particular science, and whatever the political system in which that science was operating, the knowledge that was produced bore some relation to the goals of the nation-state. These goals varied from nation to nation; weapons research was emphasized in the United States and the Soviet Union, for example, but in France and China scientific independence and self-reliance dominated. The contributors also consider to what extent the changes to science and technology practices in this era were produced by the specific politics, anxieties, and aspirations of the Cold War. Contributors Elena Aronova, Erik M. Conway, Angela N. H. Creager, David Kaiser, John Krige, Naomi Oreskes, George Reisch, Sigrid Schmalzer, Sonja D. Schmid, Matthew Shindell, Asif A. Siddiqi, Zuoyue Wang, Benjamin Wilson

The death knell has struck. Wave Radio is dead. How have 70 years of Military Research succeeded in producing a completely new and superior communications technology? Radio History gives a stranger walk than paranoid writers ever tell! While citizens were watching television, military research was directed to create an amazing radiation technology far in advance of any system known. Currently and routinely utilised, it has remained a well guarded 'open secret' for decades. The proof patents and relevant research papers have just been retrieved. Facts quell hysteria, but Truth is stranger than fiction. Want the answers? The complete technical history of military projects will show the development of every relevant project preceding HAARP. Only the facts. No hysteria. Complete with communications and weapons patent citations, this book will forever change your view of world events and technology.