Comment by theamk

When I first learned about ternary machines like SETUN [0] I was so excited! Forger bits, there are "trits", and instead of boring boolean logic you have +/0/- trits. As alien as it gets!

But then I read much more about the design, and it turns out that the reason machine was ternary is the designers had to minimize number of transistors, and leaned heavily into transformer-based logic - which naturally favors ternary values.

But for transistor/IC circuitry, there are no advantages in ternary - they key to reliability is margins, and margins require only two states. Any transistor-based ternary implementation would be forced to using a pair of bits and declare one of the four states invalid - a clear efficiency loss.

History confirmed it - even in MSU, once transistors became more available, they abandoned SETUN and started using those. Turns out at least that ternary branch was just a evolutionary dead end.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun