On 05/09/2013 06:53 AM, John Gilmore wrote:
As Ogden Nash wrote, "Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker".
There are situations in which a radix other than 2 is episodically
useful; and when these situations arise a binary machine can be
programmed very readily to exploit, say, ternary or octal logic.
Moreover, binary machines can and almost always do exhibit some
crucial ternary, signum-like behavior.
John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA
According to the various articles, the advantages of the Setun ternary
computer were "lower electricity consumption and lower production cost",
and that when the Setun at Moscow State University was eventually
replaced by a binary machine of roughly equivalent capability the binary
machine "was 2.5 times the cost of the Setun". The first Setun built
was also reported to have run 17 years without a failure. Simulating
ternary logic and arithmetic on a binary machine would obviously have
lost those advantages of a radically different hardware design.
The articles imply the decision to phase out Soviet ternary machines
must have been based more on the economic costs and inconvenience of
being different from the rest of the world than the costs of the
hardware itself.
--
Joel C. Ewing, Bentonville, AR [email protected]
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