Ok, but you're talking 1950s, when this article is talking about the '70s and '80s.
The US got so far ahead of the USSR in computing because of the military-industrial-academic complex that channelled vast public resources and knowledge into projects that had both military/state ends as well as commercial ones too. Especially after the launch of Sputnik and the subsequent sense that the US was trailing the USSR in a 'cybernetics gap', which triggered a huge amount of funding in the US for technical developments. This is the story of how the personal, graphical, interactive and internetworked computer was invented.
In the USSR the military did its own thing without sharing its knowledge and inventions with the wider society, especially with such cutting edge inventions like computers. As such outside of the military (even this is debatable), the USSR as a whole did fall significantly behind the West in terms of technological progress. Who knows, if it hadn't it might still be around today.
See Slava Gerovitch and Benjamin Peter's writings, for example:
I'm not really refuting any of that, and I think your point is orthogonal to the one that I'm making. As far as I'm aware, Western sentiment with regards to technological capability in the USSR didn't radically shift in those two or three decades. In fact I believe popular sentiment remained fairly static all throughout the Cold War which encompasses the decades you named.
The US got so far ahead of the USSR in computing because of the military-industrial-academic complex that channelled vast public resources and knowledge into projects that had both military/state ends as well as commercial ones too. Especially after the launch of Sputnik and the subsequent sense that the US was trailing the USSR in a 'cybernetics gap', which triggered a huge amount of funding in the US for technical developments. This is the story of how the personal, graphical, interactive and internetworked computer was invented.
In the USSR the military did its own thing without sharing its knowledge and inventions with the wider society, especially with such cutting edge inventions like computers. As such outside of the military (even this is debatable), the USSR as a whole did fall significantly behind the West in terms of technological progress. Who knows, if it hadn't it might still be around today.
See Slava Gerovitch and Benjamin Peter's writings, for example:
InterNyet: https://web.mit.edu/slava/homepage/articles/Gerovitch-InterN...