On 12/08/2013 05:23 PM, Ed Finnell wrote: > _Ternary "flip-flap-flop"_ > (http://www.goldenmuseum.com/1411FlipFlap_engl.html) > > This is pretty old stuff. Think the advantages were canceled out by > 'indeterminate' states. Some of the new quantum stuff has similar > possibilities. >
The Soviet Union designed and built computers based on ternary logic (Setun, Setun-70) for several decades starting in 1958. They were less expensive to produce and more electrically efficient to run than binary-oriented hardware of comparable computational power, and were actually an astute choice when the Soviet Union was trying to maximize results with limited resources. I suspect those ternary machines were eventually discontinued because they were just overwhelmed by the success of S/360 and other binary, byte oriented architectures, including S/360-compatible clones produced in the Soviet Union as ES EVM starting in 1972. The dramatic cost reductions from mass production of binary machines and specialized binary Integrated Circuits probably erased the hardware cost advantage of ternary machines, and there must also have been significant software and manpower costs involved in trying to exchange data between incompatible base-3 and base-2 data formats and from having to design unique software for a ternary architecture. While the ternary architecture does have a certain elegance, history has numerous instances of elegance losing out to mass acceptance of competing solutions. -- 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
