On 05/08/2013 08:02 PM, Lloyd Fuller wrote:
Not sure. I was just talking one time to one of the military people that were
involved with Univac and the university (Oregon State, I think). He mentioned
that they had experimented with it. And from the time frame you are probably
correct that it was transistors rather than IC's.
Lloyd
----- Original Message ----
From: Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.) <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Sent: Wed, May 8, 2013 4:28:58 PM
Subject: Re: OT - What is the proper term for "K" notation?
In <[email protected]>, on
05/06/2013
at 06:02 AM, Lloyd Fuller <[email protected]> said:
Actually, Univac played with it back in the 1960s/1970s.
Any ternary logic or memory in the 1960's was probably implemented
with discrete transistors rather than with IC's.
The Soviets actually built a computer model (Setun) with ternary logic
in 1958, fifty built before production was finally halted in 1965.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_computer
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun
Those articles don't go into much detail, but other sources describe
memory as being ternary as well, using two magnetic cores for a single
ternary digit or two tracks on drum memory. Their ternary approach was
apparently an ingenious solution to minimize costs within the
constraints of existing technology.
If the Soviets were trying that route, that alone would probably have
caused our military to explore it. I would speculate that once
large-scale integrated circuits tailored for binary logic became
universally available, that effectively guaranteed that computers with
binary logic and memory were much cheaper to build than ternary
computers and probably explains why binary computers eventually replaced
ternary development in the Soviet Union as well.
--
Joel C. Ewing, Bentonville, AR [email protected]
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
