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by ajuc 1808 days ago
I'm talking Poland specifically not USSR and there was some real computerization done by ZETO and CEOI from 60s. Poland had a few homegrown computer architectures and also since 70s had access to western IT industry (for example it used IBM mainframes pretty much as they were released).

For example PESEL system was designed then (each citizen gets assigned a number on birth, it encodes sex, date of birth, serial number from batch [so it doesn't need to be synchronized constantly], and a checksum so it's easy to find mistakes). And every database in country used that PESEL as "business id".

At first protein-based calculators were executing this algorithm but it was computerized and it's used to this day and works pretty well (even if there are some gotchas from the times when people were calculating them manually).

1 comments

I'm talking about computerization of the planning process. I don't think PESEL counts. As far as I remember Poland didn't computerize any input/output economic tables or forecast consumption from purchase data or anything of the sort that was proposed in the 50s.
There was a little of that too, for example SIZ, SPIS and CENPLAN. They were introduced partially and never functioned as designed of course, after all it was a communist country :)

If you can read Polish here are some references:

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:H9O7Cs...

https://bcpw.bg.pw.edu.pl/Content/1720/PDF/16atibz_krajowy.p...

Yes, they were introduced partially as experiments. As far as I'm aware though there was never an automated input/output calculation which is the real step #1 of cybernetic planning.