Ternary logic hardware [was: Re: 68K Macs with MacOS 7.5 still in production use...]

[Tomasz Rola]

On Tue, Sep 20, 2016 at 04:06:39PM +0200, Liam Proven wrote:
> On 16 September 2016 at 14:51, David Bridgham <dab at froghouse.org> wrote:
> > On 9/15/16 23:13, ben wrote:
> >
> >> PS: Ternary arithmetic I can understand, but Ternary Logic needs Mr
> >> Spock to figure out.
> >
> > Ternery logic would seem to be useful for implementing an asynchronous
> > design instead of, say, dual rail encoding.
> 
> 
> Huh? But there have been several -- the Russian/Polish SETUN was the
> first committed to hardware.
> 
> http://www.computer-museum.ru/english/setun.htm
> 
> But there have been others:
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_computer
> 
> One chap is even trying to build his own:
> 
> https://hackaday.io/project/1043-base-3-ternary-computer-from-scratch

As far as I can tell, about the only Polish contribution to Setun
might have been by Polish mathematician Jan Łukasiewicz, who was the
first to propose working system of 3-valued logic called Ł3 / L3. In
fact, the hackaday guy's notes down the page, where he describes
logic, seem to be very much descended from L3, with some mods -
because L3 operates on {0, 1/2, 1} and the guy operates on {0, 1,
2}. For nice(r) set of formulas, have a look at Polish wikipage:

https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logika_trójwartościowa#Charakterystyka_prawdziwo.C5.9Bciowa_funktor.C3.B3w_klasycznych

Note: I have no idea what I talk about. I only licked the subject and
the taste was interesting, but I have never built a 3VL circuit (even on a
paper) or run an emulator.

-- 
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **