there's some really great mini documentaries on YouTube above the Soviet internet of the 1960s, which would have taken over as the central planning committee and managed the supply and demand automatically. When you look at what it was supposed to be, and why it failed (a lot of people worked very hard to make sure it wouldn't succeed) it's really interesting stuff.

here's one I watched recently enough about it; [https://youtu.be/cLOD5f-q0as?si=D8mVJiK603HPdgKY](Asianometry - Why the Soviet Internet Failed)

The higher-ups were skeptical of the concept of computers

It's arguably dumber than that. The higher-ups treated R&D like any other centrally-planned ordeal, which meant a bunch of incredibly smart people in different countries were at each others' throats for the privilege of trying to build a thing... rather than just building multiple things and picking the ones that worked.

When it was a 5-ton, room-filling affair - called the Small Electronic Calculating Machine, because all programmers are the exact same kind of dork - building exactly one kinda made sense. When the west had three competing 6502 minicomputers for like a hundred bucks each, it was just tight-fisted control for the sake of political grandstanding. The fuckin' BBC rolled out a better centralized computing standard.

The root problem is having "a bicycle for the mind" in a country that restricts travel.