=Eternal National Glory, - A cyberpunk-themed Timeline and Taiwan's Invasion of the Mainland=

[BigBoy88]

The Soviets had good ideas for cybernetics, but not computers powerful enough in reality. More investment there and less in the nuclear arsenal?

Otherwise, it is quite well known but little developed in the uchronies, Allende's project for Chile:

Project Cybersyn - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

In some ways, the soviets could take funds from more vanity-projects like hydrofoils and dedicate them to more significant computational research. The soviets in reality had very good sciences with regards to mathematics and by extension the beginning of early software/computer programming logic. Much of cybernetics as a field, despite gaining attention and huge support by the Soviet government under Aksel Berg, ended up squandering its funds in bureaucratic expansion under the cybernetic council with many original scientists involved ending up breaking ties with the field.

And the Cybersyn is probably one of the closest things we ever got to a socialist cyberntic planning system. It showed promise when some parts of it were first completed before Allende's suicide and overthrow.

I think that many of the early Setun series of trinary computers would actually be hugely beneficial for the soviets to continue in regards to cybernetics, because the trinary system of logic can make up for a lack of Soviet hardware in computational output seen in miniaturised binary computers in the west at that time. And I'm currently writing about this when I get the chance.

 

[BigBoy88]

Here’s some more in that kind of style if you’re ever needing 80s:

De Wolfe

De Wolfe Music | Production Music Library | Search, demo and download Production Music | Music for TV, Film, Radio & New Media

www.dewolfemusic.com

nice music, I'll give it a listen for when I have time to write again!

 

[BigBoy88]

Friday, 20th January 1961 – Washington D.C.

For the last few months in the latter half of 1960, the campaigns of both Republican and Democratic nominees, Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy were certainly varied. Both parties showed a variety of different and even new tactics to get as many Americans to vote for their candidate. Kennedy held campaigns in particular states where the choice of voters wasn’t fully obvious, the well known “Swing-states” as they were referred as. Nixon’s campaigns targeted the whole country however and tried to gain as much broad appeal as possible, a strategy that was beginning to feel shaky for many in the Republican establishment. However, midway through the election months, nearing October, Republican vice-president nominee Walter Judd and especially Henry Cabot Lodge proposed some major changes to Nixon’s campaigns. No one would be better suited for helping manage Nixon’s campaigns in that last month than Lodge, who was the major force of the Draft MacArthur movement for the 1952 election previously. Lodge would advise Nixon to focus on the Swing-states of New Jersey, Illinois, and Minnesota. These proposals to target the Swing-states would culminate in Nixon’s final tours of those states, with Walter Judd, a Minnesotan politician himself, accompanying him as a major figure during the Saint Paul city rally. Kennedy’s worries during the campaigning was summarised with the potential for his Catholic faith not being able to achieve a broad base of support amongst the predominantly Protestant US public. Other issues regarding Harry F. Byrd’s influence amongst the Southern Democrats in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi also posed a potential problem for taking away the necessary votes needed by Kennedy to win the election. Despite it all though, and leading into the last month of the election up to early November, Kennedy was sure that his earlier efforts in targeting the Swing-states, the Black vote with a recent call of endorsement from Martin Luther King Sr, and his “Missile-Gap,” tough on Communism rhetoric, would all culminate in his succession as the next president of the United States. This fate however hung in the balance of the electoral votes from New Jersey, Minnesota and Illinois...

It was a cold wintery midday in Washington D.C. The temperatures had dropped since last night and Walter Judd was seated beside Sam Rayburn. As much as everyone in the capitol had been worried about the potential of a snowed-in Capitol Hill during the nor’easter, with the help of the US Army Corp Engineers and a slew of boy-scouts, the walkways and open-terraces of Capitol Hill had been freed of hefty snow for the benefit of those attending the inauguration. Kennedy, one of the most prominent men that day looked out at the crowds of people, the cameras, presumably filming a live television broadcast of the event, for the first time in colour of all things. The occasion was momentous, thousands of onlookers viewing the scenery all the way down from the Capitol Building as their new president was sworn in. And as John Fitzgerald Kennedy took a momentary glance at his wife, Jackie, who sat beside him, his attention was caught once more by the man in front of him.

“...So help me god,”

Nixon repeated after Earl Warren as he gave his presidential oath in front of the Bible. Just after lowering his right hand, Nixon shook the Judge’s hand in congratulations. And with that, the end of the MacArthur years and the beginning of what would come to be known as the Nixon administration had begun. Nixon subsequently shook the hands of few front-row figures, Douglas MacArthur, Walter Judd, and last but definitely not least, his now-defeated fellow, John F. Kennedy. Kennedy took the event well like everyone else, it had been an extremely close election, maybe even the closest in US history thus far, but a fair win was a fair win, and Kennedy had given this round a fair shot. Sitting back down beside his wife and with his running mate Lyndon B. Johnson sitting right behind him, he listened to Nixon’s presidential speech. What followed within those next 15 minutes was a speech delivered by President Nixon that touched on many of the topics that had been the focal point of his campaign, interluded by the occasional bouts of viewer applause with the punctuation of each promise and each statement. Multiple hints of influence or assistance from Vice President Judd and upcoming Secretary of State William P. Rogers were also present in the speech.

And as the president’s speech neared the end, Judd’s influence shined brighter more than at any other point, with the president speaking of the need for the US to support it’s allies both in the west and with emphasis, in the Far-east. In line with the successes of the MacArthur doctrine and the furthering of alliances between the Formosa Chinese, Koreans and Japanese within SEATO and America’s scientific research. Nixon promised that his tenure as president would be marked with increased spending in scientific fields, to bring strength and support to the US’s allies and to present America as a beacon of scientific progress and democratic values. Afterall nothing mattered more than the,“Struggle to achieve the dawn of tomorrow,” as Nixon put it in his speech. And by the very end of his inaugural speech, Nixon closed with the words,“... My fellow Americans, with the continuation of our prosperity as a nation, ask yourself, are you prepared to be a part of history?,”. And with that open-ended question, one which signalled a shaky yet ultimately positive outlook for the future, the audiences applauded the president as he shortly moved off of the pedestal. Kennedy momentarily stood back up to shake Nixon’s hands once more for common courtesy, sitting back down as the event continued with a musical band playing. Kennedy looked back across the swathes of people that had appeared here before the Capitol, just as he did moments before, and thought about Nixon’s last words. Just like most in that audience, they were very unaware of the future technologies and paradigms that awaited them at this point. All of this as the Advanced Research Projects Agency was supporting some of the greatest leaps in technology at that moment.

​

Tuesday, 18th January 1961 – Palo Alto

Chih-Tang Sah & the Fairchild Labs
​

Chih-Tang Sah and Frank Wanlass like many scientists of the late 50s and 60s were believers in the future of the semiconductor, with the current Bipolar Junction Transistors seen by the two as an overly bulky solution to the future of computation which they believed would require the scalability offered by Mohamed Atalla’s MOSFET system in 1958. With Chih-Tang having demonstrated the potential of Atalla’s Metal-Oxide Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) circuit to the executives of the Fairchild company in 1960, he was immediately granted a team of researchers consisting of 64 chemists, engineers and physicists to develop his idea for a Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS). In that short year span of time, not only was he granted the researchers needed, but the Fairchild company was also visited by a seemingly obscure man by the name of Jack Ruina. Ruina was the Director of ARPA at the time, and after an initial visit followed up by two more visits to the company’s facilities in that year of 1960, involving some discussions with head reasearchers, including Chih-Tang, a deal would be made. The deal ended up being a jackpot for Chih-Tang, Wanlass and their team. Not only were they given greater federal funding through the ARPA agency, but using the Federal government’s system of extensive listings of researchers and connections, established by the 1959 “Sciences and Communication Act”, they also established a formal connection with Atalla himself, who ended up helping out with the research team’s endeavours with CMOS. Atalla saw great potential in the ability to combine the P and N type transistors into one cohesive unit, the potential to lessen heat loss would prove extremely useful if further miniaturisation of the transistor continued. As two fellow researchers he ended up giving advice and recommendations via mail to Wanlass and Chih-Tang. Chih-Tang, who admired Atalla would respond back every time. The contacts between the two parties would be kept unknown from the Fairchild corporation and Bell Labs, the latter being where Atalla was employed in at the time. Though from impressions of what was going on at Fairchild, Atalla began to consider working for them instead of Bell Labs, it seemed that his research would be better appreciated in Fairchild...

It was on this day not too long after the beginning of the New Year that Chih-Tang was finishing up work in the lab. He was getting ever closer to achieving the final results of the project he’d been working on for the last year. And under the microscope, he observed a recently made prototype CMOS transistor chip. He was feeling a little more giddy than usual today, and instead of awaiting just another moment for one of his assistant electrical engineers to show up, he instead began to test it himself by flowing some voltage through the prototype. He observed the chip once more as he carefully operated the miniature equipment, checking the readings of the analytical instruments on the lab countertop. And then he noticed it, the electricity was flowing through the device, the electronegative charge was present, the P-type and N-type substrates of the device seemed to be functioning as planned, “Oh my lord, I think it works,” Chih-Tang thought to himself as his eyes went wide and a smile spread across his face. Wanlass was at another area of the lab, diagnosing some other silicon wafers and ensuring that the crystallization process had went well with some colleagues. Noticing the time, it was nearly 6pm, and as he was about to finish his notes he heard a call from the other end of the lab, “It works! Get over here, our Semiconductor is working!,” Chih-Tang called out in excitement to the others from the doorway. Wanlass looked at the other fellows for a moment before carefully placing down his notes and heading up with others to see just what was going on at Chih-Tang Sah’s workstation.

Monday, 20th Feburary 1961 – Novosibirsk University

Cyberneticists Alexei Lyapunov & Axel Ivanovich Berg
​

Axel Ivanovich Berg was seated alongside his colleague and good friend Alexei Lyapunov. The two of them were discussing matters of cybernetics amongst each other in an empty meeting room. The room like the rest of the building was clean and new, both in design and when it was built in the 50s. All was possible upon Sergei Sobolev’s initial founding of the institute in 57’. The two professors in many ways wished to emanate the successes of Sobolev’s recent contributions to Soviet education and science, and thankfully, he was also as keen as they were on a field that was rapidly gaining traction within the Union; Cybernetics. Berg and Lyapunov knew that their window of opportunity was within reach at this point. Mainly due to the ascendancy of Nikita Khrushchev, the current General Secretary of the Union, a man from humble backgrounds who had built himself up in the party ever since his involvement in the Soviet administration of Ukraine. Khrushchev both shocked and relieved the world when he denounced Stalinism and opened up the country more to the wider world. And no matter what came from his policies, they at least allowed the sciences to pick up pace again, especially since the days of Stalinist witchhunting. And since the end of those days and a return to normalcy across the country, Berg, Lyapunov, Sobolev, Anatoly Kitov and more scientists, eagerly legitimised the field of cybernetics across the Union, and they were closer to that dream than ever before. The ideas of using feedback-loop systems and automation with new computational technology seemed to closely resemble the ideological Marxist principles of the USSR. And with this potential of a fully-automated command economy, all ran by perfectly calibrated algorithms, being the future, many upcoming, young scientists began to support the field.

But for those two scientists, Berg and Lyapunov, one more thing remained so that the field could flourish. Namely, a dedicated Institution of Cybernetics in Moscow itself. This prospect would’ve seemed like a pipe-dream in the 50s, but now things had changed, Axel Berg had setup and become chair of the Council of Cybernetics in 1959, having been able to convince the Presidium of the Academy to create the Council. Lyapunov himself had also established a Department of Cybernetics the previous year for the primary purpose of research and development. But as him and Axel discussed the matter of forming an institute, perhaps even merging both the future institute and and council together, both knew that Khrushchev, might simply decline the formation of a new institute. After all, Soviet resources and state funds weren’t unlimited and a halt to new, more expensive institutions was inevitable,

“...well, we don’t have the option to send the Presidium, let alone the leader of the country a single letter asking for funds, we’ll look like hopeless beggars in these politicians’ eyes,”

Berg commented with a pessimistic tone, his chair creaking as he leaned back a little before leaning forward and continued, his eyebrows perking up,

“They’re giving loads of resources to Korolev ever since he put that tin-ball into space, and it doesn’t seem likely that they’ll just stop eaither. No, we’ll have to get some sort of petition, a large grouping of scientists, technicians, mathematicians anyone with some status in the Union to show support for the Institution,”

He continued as he scratched his head a little before Lyapunov commented at his suggestion, Lyapunov’s hand stroking at his beard,

“That might just work Axel, we could even write a report on it, maybe even request a meeting with Khrushchev, you can get that done couldn’t you? You could even get some higher-ups in the military right?,”

Lyapunov suggested as the room was flooded by the yellow light of an evening sun. In this discussion though, Lyapunov knew that the odds would be ultimately decided by the General-Secretary Khruschev, and that like other bureaucrats, they liked to be wowed by a promising concept more than actual lesser interesting but more significant sciences based on things like numbers and data. Berg had been able to present the cybernetic concept and vision well thus far but maybe another bureaucrat like him would be required...

“Maybe, I think it’s certainly possible. I could try and organise something with the Academy, a meeting with Kitov could be good, hmmm... I’m not sure about the military, however maybe there’s someone in the Soviet Space Program who could be useful...is there anyone else I should consider?,”

Berg replied to Lyapunov as he glanced out the window before looking back towards his scientific comrade. Almost as if a lightbulb had lit up above his head, Lyapunov clicked his fingers, catching Berg’s attention as he knew another figure that could be of use; Mstislav Keldysh, one of the most prominent men in the Space Program right now! And he was rising higher and higher in the academic ranks, maybe even poised to be directly a part of the Academy of Science’s Presidium!,

“I think... I think I know who we should bring in to help us with this Institute...,”

Monday, 20th February 1961 – Forests of Katanga

Patrice Lumumba Being Captured by Mobutu Forces & Moise Tshombe Standing Before the Katangan Flag​

Gabriel Tshilobu like the many men across the rapidly disintegrating Congo, had been enlisted from his home village to fight for one of the regional factions. He in particular was enlisted for the newly self-declared South Kasai breakaway state. This devolution of circumstances had affected the young man deeply, he was only 18 and was handed one of the few rifles the breakaway state had in stock. And there were always promises of more munitions and weapons on the way. Why things had gotten to this point, he did not fully understand. Nearly every politician who had worked together in the former Lumumba cabinet seemed to have their own interests in mind, with many simply breaking off to their own tribal people, or at least that’s what Albert Kalonji had done. With conflict all around, positions of his group needed to change over and over with the unstable fronts in the forests of South Kasai before moving towards the Katangan border. The same region where Kalonji had fled to since the overrunning of Bakwanga by General Mobutu’s Armée Nationale Congolaise (ANC). Gabriel remembered the way that the conflict had been told to him when the tribe Chief told everyone of the need for supporting Kalonji, afterall, the Congo government had failed and only independance was desirable unless it offered federalisation. Gabriel however, only having been in the seperatist forces for a few months wished that this conflict hadn’t happened, every moment felt like it could be his last and god knows how long this conflict would take. The experience of having had to shoot some of what would have been his fellow countrymen had been a brutal experience, something that no one should ever experience. But with some of the reported massacres and destruction brought in by the Congo government forces, or the ANC, into his homeland, what else could he do but shoot at them.

And every now and then, he spotted the men with the blue helmets, or blue berets. And oftentimes did he see them with some sort of white most likely Belgian mercenary in their custody. These were the UN forces and were there to establish peace, or so they proclaimed. Their inaction and proposed neutrality from all sides of the conflict was staunchly criticised by many, and especially by the central government that had been spearheaded by the former Patrice Lumumba, or at least that’s what Gabriel heard. Gabriel may have been young and from a local village, but he was not a fool, he knew very well that much of this conflict, from Tshombe down in Elisabethville, to Kasa-Vubu in Leopoldville, to Gizenga in Stanleyville was being decided by the cash of foreign nations. He turned to one of his compatriots, another man of arms named Akile. He like Gabriel was Baluba too, and at the age of 19, he came directly from Bakwanga. He had a pack of cigarettes on him and a lighter, the former he had bartered from one of the French mercenaries in the Katangese gendarmerie.

He offered Gabriel a cigarette, to which Gabriel declined. Gabriel himself was a non-smoker, and didn’t like the taste of the cigarette smoke. The two stayed in their post, keeping a lookout for ANC troops just a kilometer up ahead. Suddenly, rainfall began to pour down on them, the rain season was still in full swing. With Akile’s cigarette lit up, the smoke went up in the air as Gabriel looked around, counting the minutes as the sounds of raindrops was combined with the chirps and squwaks of the jungle birds. Despite the situation he was in, he hoped for a better outcome, if seperatism worked out for Katanga and his own South-Kasai, at least then there could be some official peace to go with it. America in the west seemed not to be involving itself all that much with the conflict so far, and the fate of what that powerful country would do, would inevitably involve it’s newest president, Richard Nixon.

 

[BigBoy88]

New post up, just a few important technical developments around the world and the new president! The next division will be focused on the buildup in the Taiwan Straits and some developments in Europe, a calm before the storm...