Post #2233257
2026-05-07 04:48 UTC
@benroyce@mastodon.social @alexadeswift@lgbtqia.space @gknauss@mastodon.social
Late 1990's I was in Russia visiting one of their Universities. I was in an office waiting for someone talking to a Secretary. She was excited she had just gotten a new computer, I'd guess it had a clone of the 8086 running at 1MHz she said. It was running a bootlegged cc of MS.dos with bootleg cc M$ Windows. I was up town, had an i486 laptop that I almost lost to airport security. They thought I might be carrying restricted tech . . . 😂
Replies (1)
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@benroyce@mastodon.social 2026-05-07 04:57
@A_Minion@mastodon.social @alexadeswift@lgbtqia.space @gknauss@mastodon.social When the USSR was trying to compete with the West in the early age of computers they had a freaking *trinary* computer 🤯 Apparently a number of algorithms do work better in ternary (you have 1, 0, and -1 and can do cool math things with that) but the payoff didn't justify the extra circuitry fucking weird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun