Before '73 coup, Chile tried to find the right software for socialism

When military forces loyal to General Augusto Pinochet staged a coup here in September 1973, they made a surprising discovery. Salvador Allende's Socialist government had quietly embarked on a novel experiment to manage Chile's economy using a clunky mainframe computer and a network of telex machines.

While the operations room never became fully operational, Cybersyn gained stature within the Allende government for helping to outmaneuver striking workers in October 1972. That helped planners realize — as the pioneers of the modern-day Internet did — that the communications network was more important than computing power, which Chile did not have much of, anyway.

Cybersyn was born in July 1971 when Fernando Flores, then a 28-year-old government technocrat, sent a letter to Beer seeking his help in organizing Allende's economy by applying cybernetic concepts