September/October 1985 RAIN Page 21 over again, to knock on actual doors, and TELEXed nay arrival information. Four days before leaving San Francisco I received three official TELEXes, advising me that the Ministry of Communication would arrange a computer hookup, that I was invited to bring slow-scan video equipment for tests between our countries, and that I would have a meeting with Professor Oleg Smirnov, Director of the Institute for Automated Systems. The Institute, founded in 1982, is responsible for all computer communication in the Soviet Union. It is affiliated with the Academy of Sciences USSR and the State Committee for Science and Technology. I arranged a loan of the TV equipment from Colorado Video Inc. in Boulder. The gear was put on the wrong plane in London, and ended up in Istanbul, where it was seized by Turkish customs. Life is sometimes unpredictable on the U.S.-Soviet frontier! Five days later, British Air liberated the equipment, and it was flown to me in Moscow courtesy of Iraqi Airlines. The equipment, which enables a still TV image to be transmitted via ordinary telephone lines, was finally Q; Do you mean you just want to make communication more efficient? A: That's it. tested between Moscow, New York, Boulder, and Berkeley on a video conference call. Signal quality was poor, and I left the system in Moscow for further tests. In my meeting with Smirnov, I asked if he would be willing to sponsor the proposed computer conference network using EIES, and to explore the possible use of slow- scan to provide visual images to supplement computer text. He agreed. On June 3rd I received his official TELEX in San Francisco, “THANK YOU FOR YR OFFER TO USE EIES. WE ARE READY TO TAKE PART IN PROPOSED COMPUTER CONFERENCE AS WELL AS TO COORDINATE ITS OPERATION FROM OUR SIDE." The conference is now underway, and judging from its spirit, this appears to be a long-term, expanding relationship. At the moment we are connected to Moscow, via land lines to Helsinki and Vienna, where uplinks to TELENET are found. Professor Smirnov is now exploring ways to build a "Teleport" in Moscow—to faciliate interactive East-West data exchange. Westerners can now lease small terminals in Moscow's International Trade Center for computer communications with the West. This service should be available from Intourist hotel rooms within several months. \CE TREK poster
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