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Good Logicians. In terms of human talent—"brainware" in the argot of computer men—Hammer believes Russian cyberneticists are often better logicians than their U.S. counterparts. However, they are oriented toward the oretical problems. At the big Soviet training institutes, students concentrate very little on the standard international computer language for commerce, known as COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language). Instead, they drill in ALGOL and FORTRAN, the two major scientific languages.
Soviet officials seem unhappy with their computer industry. Earlier this year, a vice chairman of the state planning committee complained in an article in Pravda that just about everything was wrong with the computer effort, including underutilization of machines, missing printout attachments and poorly motivated technicians and managers.
The problems are the familiar ills that customarily plague Communist enterprises: top-heavy bureaucracy, lack of competition (the U.S. has more than 100 companies making computers), a work climate that inhibits innovation. These traits are bad enough in a less cerebral undertaking than computers, but in a field where experimentation is absolutely vital, the Communist system is especially stultifying.
To make up for its shortcomings, Moscow sometimes turns abroad for ideas and does not always use ethical methods to get them. Development of the Ryad series of computers began when KGB agents evidently spirited away an IBM 360 from West Germany in the late 1960s. In The Netherlands, where Moscow has set up a computer center, the Dutch government last year expelled the Soviet director on espionage charges. Suspicion about him arose after a Dutch employee at the center reported having been given a $4,500 bonus for explaining to the Russians how the Dutch police use their computer to identify wanted persons and stolen autos.