Post #2233258

2026-05-07 04:57 UTC

@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

Replies (6)

@A_Minion@mastodon.social 2026-05-07 05:07

@benroyce@mastodon.social @alexadeswift@lgbtqia.space @gknauss@mastodon.social Doesn't surprise me, what got me was they couldn't write their own OS. If they were going to bootleg an os seemed to me that would have been better off with IBM OS2. I ran my BBS on it far better than desqview. I could actually run as many incidence & phone lines as I wanted. Tho I never got past 4. At the time there was a pop of < 15000 including animals in an area the size of W Virginia.

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@riley@toot.cat 2026-05-07 05:11

@benroyce@mastodon.social For historic context, Setun wasn't about competition in the field of computers, but of transistors. More importantly, though, some sources suggest the Setun team may have discovered the Forth programming language years before Chuck Moore did. @A_Minion@mastodon.social @alexadeswift@lgbtqia.space @gknauss@mastodon.social

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@log@mastodon.sdf.org 2026-05-07 05:11

@benroyce@mastodon.social @A_Minion@mastodon.social @alexadeswift@lgbtqia.space @gknauss@mastodon.social e-nary is the theoretical most efficient numeric information format, but since nobody can figure out how to have a fractional state, that means ternary is the closest alternative and binary the next closest.

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@dotyk@mastodon.social 2026-05-07 05:39

@benroyce@mastodon.social @A_Minion@mastodon.social @alexadeswift@lgbtqia.space @gknauss@mastodon.social #Russians, as always, lie that they were the first in the Soviet Union in something. The first "Soviet #computer" was designed and implemented in #Kyiv, #Ukraine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MESM

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@mxchara@seattle.pink 2026-05-07 06:03

@benroyce@mastodon.social @A_Minion@mastodon.social @alexadeswift@lgbtqia.space @gknauss@mastodon.social I would love to mess around with a ternary system, for the heck of it. it would be fun to dig up some old schematics for implementing ternary logic

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@illogical_me@mastodon.cloud 2026-05-07 15:27

@benroyce@mastodon.social @A_Minion@mastodon.social @alexadeswift@lgbtqia.space @gknauss@mastodon.social TIL , thanks for sharing!

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