On Sun, 8 Dec 2013 20:58:27 -0600, Joel C. Ewing wrote: >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 wonder what the states were, electronically? Positive, ground, and negative? And whether it was possible to build a ternary flipflapflop with fewer tubes/transistors than a binary flipflop.
Of course, "tri-state" bus transceivers are old stuff: 0, 1, and high-impedance for uncommitted -- "let someone else decide." I believe the original S/360 bus and tag cables didn't do that; rather they used NPN (I think) emitter followers with resistive pulldowns in the terminators. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
