I knew the Soviets invented a portable phone long before the West did, but the 40s? Wow! I didn’t know it was that much earlier.
If only the central planners had seen the value in computers before failing to do so lost them the Cold War.
Soviet science… yeah, maybe there’s something to the “Soviet Superscience” trope in terrible Western movies from the Cold War era. They were good at what they did.
1957 prototype, invented by Leonid Kupryanovich but yeah, they also had the first operable true cellphone network in 1963. Fun fact: the 1961 version of Kupryanovich phone was the size of cigarette pack and weighted 70 grams.
The tragedy of quite a lot of Soviet science like that was that it was too futuristic and didn’t found much usage at the time, or was abandoned in the face of much more pressing needs of society, like why do you even need a cellphone when a lot of country lacks normal ones. Answer was: only in the regions where radio was unreliable and normal phone unfeasible to build, hence the abovementioned 1963 Altai system used in Siberia but not anywhere else.
And in the west cellphone also had to wait decades to become common after it was invented there too.
Yeah, I do notice that trend. Soviet science tended to be… possible, and very useful if it had been built and used, but often suffered from a combination of being so far ahead of its time that the utility wasn’t apparent yet and building it would be impractical without later technologies that made base components of such complex devices cheaper or easier to make, and of the Soviet Union being a state under siege socialism often allocating resources on a razor’s edge that simply couldn’t afford to experiment with anything that wasn’t immediately useful and likely to save more resources in the short to medium term than implementing it would cost in the very short term.
Like, the Soviets invented a ternary computer. Western compsci has been trying to get beyond binary for a very long time. But since the Soviets were never big on computers, we never figured out if that could have gone anywhere.
I knew the Soviets invented a portable phone long before the West did, but the 40s? Wow! I didn’t know it was that much earlier.
If only the central planners had seen the value in computers before failing to do so lost them the Cold War.
Soviet science… yeah, maybe there’s something to the “Soviet Superscience” trope in terrible Western movies from the Cold War era. They were good at what they did.
1957 prototype, invented by Leonid Kupryanovich but yeah, they also had the first operable true cellphone network in 1963. Fun fact: the 1961 version of Kupryanovich phone was the size of cigarette pack and weighted 70 grams.
The tragedy of quite a lot of Soviet science like that was that it was too futuristic and didn’t found much usage at the time, or was abandoned in the face of much more pressing needs of society, like why do you even need a cellphone when a lot of country lacks normal ones. Answer was: only in the regions where radio was unreliable and normal phone unfeasible to build, hence the abovementioned 1963 Altai system used in Siberia but not anywhere else.
And in the west cellphone also had to wait decades to become common after it was invented there too.
Yeah, I do notice that trend. Soviet science tended to be… possible, and very useful if it had been built and used, but often suffered from a combination of being so far ahead of its time that the utility wasn’t apparent yet and building it would be impractical without later technologies that made base components of such complex devices cheaper or easier to make, and of the Soviet Union being a state under siege socialism often allocating resources on a razor’s edge that simply couldn’t afford to experiment with anything that wasn’t immediately useful and likely to save more resources in the short to medium term than implementing it would cost in the very short term.
Like, the Soviets invented a ternary computer. Western compsci has been trying to get beyond binary for a very long time. But since the Soviets were never big on computers, we never figured out if that could have gone anywhere.
i could be wrong about the year/time frame, i’m stupid