How it began
In July 1971 Fernando Flores, a 28-year-old engineer at Chile's State Development Corporation, wrote to the British cybernetician Stafford Beer asking how to apply cybernetics to the newly nationalized industries under President Salvador Allende. Beer arrived in Santiago four months later and worked with a Chilean team that grew from 10 to 35 people by March 1972. The system was designed by Beer and built in Chile, so its first construction is Chilean and its concepts are British. In March 1972 the project was named Cybersyn, and SYNCO in Spanish.
How it works
Cybersyn had four parts. Cybernet was a network of telex machines in state-run enterprises linked to a single mainframe in Santiago. The team used 400 telex machines that the telecommunications company had bought in the 1960s and never installed. Cyberstride was statistical software that checked daily factory figures and predicted short-term performance. CHECO was an economic simulator. The operations room was a space where managers could view the data and decide on responses. Factories were first modeled by operations research engineers, and then sent their indices each day.
Who pushed back
The project had limits. Only about twenty factories were fully modeled and connected. After the October strike Flores concluded that Cybersyn could not regulate the scale of Chile's economic and political problems. The project ended with the military coup of 11 September 1973. The military abandoned the system and destroyed the operations room.
What changed first
The telex network was the first working component and the only one used regularly by the government. During the truckers' strike of October 1972 it carried about 2,000 messages a day, by Beer's estimate, and helped the government direct raw materials, fuel and transport. According to the historian Eden Medina, by May 1973 26.7 percent of nationalized industries, responsible for half of the sector's revenue, had been incorporated to some degree.
What lasted
The operations room, designed by a team led by Gui Bonsiepe, is remembered for the priority it gave to the human operator and for an interface that did not require typing on a keyboard. Historians of computing treat Cybersyn as an early case of computers and data networks applied to government and industry instead of military or scientific work.
