Ternary Computing Revisited

Black Acid writes: "American Scientist's Third Base was a nice introduction to the advantages base 3 but didn't really explain ternary computing. Since 1995, Steve Grubb has maintained trinary.cc which covers many aspects of computing with base 3. Not only are the basic unary and binary gates enumerated, which I independently verified as being basic building blocks, but real-world circuits are described also. Half and full adders, multiplexers and demultiplexers, counters, shift registers, and even the legendary flip-flap-flop are all covered with ternary algebra equations and schematics. Steve Grubb touches on problems of of interfacing to binary computers elegantly, although no schematics are given. Perhaps most impressive are the Transistor Models - schematics of the basic gates which can be built from cheap parts available at your local electronic component store."

Comments

Zero effect to developers...

[MosesJones]

To be honest I say "who cares" if I'm running on a base 2, base 3, base 98 or Analogue computer. The vast majority of applications are written in languages that are then compiled to the wire. So use the most efficient deployment machine but it doesn't effect your day to day job. There appears in general to be too much in computing about the next whiz bang feature from marketing rather than developing from the building blocks we already have.

Sure this sort of thing is "interesting", but what is the actual benefit of writing applications in HLL that are then compiled down to this instruction set or that ? If it runs faster and is more reliable then fair enough but most of this is redundant as in reality a slower processor that has had more development time in its compiler will probably function better than a faster processor with a poor compiler.

This obsession with the quirky and the new is indicative of marketing and the hacking culture of computing as it now stands, M$ are probably the worst proponents of this approach but no other really make a stand against it.

This isn't "Stuff that matters" its "irrelevant stuff to pass sometime"

When was the last time anyone read an article _anywhere_ that talks about building on the current technology base rather than re-inventing the wheel. Linux has succeeded by building on the past. M$ have succeeded by continually re-inventing it. This is yet another example of the desire for "new or different" over getting hands dirty and improving what is there