Another note toward a Soviet Internet

Not only did queueing theory—or the mathematical study of waiting in
lines that inspired packet-switching, the heart of Internet-style
distributed digital networks—resemble a Soviet way of life, it built
on the work of the early 20th century Russian mathematician Andrey
Markov (his last name means Carrot by the way). “Markov chains”
deal with stochastic, or probabilistic, processes for organizing event
sequences: they make thinkable instantaneous change across fixed
states in probabilistic systems and they precede Shannon's line "At
any given time either X = 0 or X = 1." Shannon, in turn, cites and
builds directly on Markov chains in his thesis work on electrical
modeling of information processes.

Even if it turns out the US military had the idea for a distributed computer
network first, the intellectual inheritance from and social resonance across
a spectrum of scientific fronts in Eastern Europe (Markov chains in
information theory, queueing theory, packet-switching, Kolmogorov’s
biology in Wiener’s cybernetics) already seems worth a story.