Cybertonia, metaverse seed
- The USSR, 1 January 1960. At the feast of the new year of the Kiev Cybernetic Institute, researchers came up with inventing a virtual country in joke. They'd call him Cybertonia, and without losing a sense of humor, they would continue to develop this idea in the 1960s.
Russian mathematician Victor Glushkov (1923-1982) has just been appointed director of the Kiev Cyber Institute. Glushkov, considered a pioneer of cybernetics, made important contributions to automata theory, algorithm algebra, artificial intelligence or automated economic management.
But in the 1960s, his team’s main mission was to develop what was proposed in the past decade by military scientist Anatoly Kitov. Kitov's intention, and from there that of Glushkv, was to expand the network connecting military computers and make it available to civil society, in other words, to develop the Internet. We know that this competition was won by the United States, but the Soviet problem was not technological. The scientists in Kiev were able to make progress on this road, but the obstacle was in Moscow; the Soviet authorities found it too dangerous to grow exponentially and put them at the service of the citizens.
For them, Cybertonia was a getaway to relieve frustration. The virtual country was officially founded two years later, in 1962, and elements were gradually incorporated. They had a government, the Cybertonia Robot Council, and a constitution. They created the newspaper, the currency of their own, the passport -- and the pet, a robot playing saxophone, because the Cybertonians were fans of jazz music. They also signed a marriage certificate.
They organized scientific conferences, symposia and, occasionally, celebrations. In fact, the population of Cybertonia was young; the average age of researchers at the Cybernetic Institute was 25 years when they began to create the virtual world.
But by 1970 they had to abandon the development project of what the Internet would be, and at the same time, Cybertonia was shut down.
The members of the Kiev Cybernetics Institute, or the Cybertonians, had no tools to do everything they thought. It would take a few decades to develop this technology. But they laid the foundation for many of the ideas that today are used by meta-verse platforms. In other words, they thought of the first metaverse.
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