[Codeolences] tells us about the FORBIDDEN Soviet Computer That Defied Binary Logic. The Setun, the world’s first ternary computer, was developed at Moscow State University in 1958. Its troubled and short-lived history is covered in the video. The machine itself uses “trits” (ternary digits) instead of “bits” (binary digits).
When your digits have three discrete values there are a multiplicity of ways of assigning meaning to each state, and the Setun uses a system known as balanced ternary where each digit can be either -1, 0, or 1 and otherwise uses a place-value system in the normal way.
An interesting factoid that comes up in the video is that base-3 (also known as radix-3) is the maximally efficient way to represent numbers because three is the closest integer to the natural growth constant, the base of the natural logarithm, e, which is approximately 2.718 ≈ 3.
If you’re interested to know more about ternary computing check out There Are 10 Kinds Of Computers In The World and Building The First Ternary Microprocessor.
The DUMB youtube thumbnail that made me fully not interested in the video.
If you want to post such bullshit, I have a better propsal: find yourself a female satisfaction device made out of stainless steel and see if it chips your teeth.
I didn’t like the thumbnail much, either. I guess it’s the typical cold war trope, simply.
Likely not being meant in a bad way, even.
As a German, I got used to it seeing tank, Hitler references etc. when our history is being concerned. Or worse, Bavaria references. 🥲
Sometimes that’s confusing when you grew up in what became a modern, peaceful country many decades later.
Based. Zero tolerance for clickbait slop.
You really have odd fantasies. But really if you don’t have anything nice to say then you should keep it to yourself.
Asianometry also did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWKyrAXxzGA
Asianometry also did a video on ternary computers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWKyrAXxzGA&t=3s
I seem to remember a teacher claiming that Western dominance in computing is a result of the Soviet Union chasing the efficiency of ternary (fewer transistors needed to represent a number) versus the efficiency of binary math.
I think it was more about the backwardness of soviet manufacturing technologies, and the inability to mass-produce the components like RAM chips.
They were relying on espionage and copying from the west rather than developing their own, because the soviet “culture” viewed individual competence as politically dangerous. The system could not become dependent on any individual they couldn’t replace at will. In other words, if you became too much of an expert in your own work, you were likely to be sent to a prison camp and die there.
Almost all top scientists in the Soviet Union were imprisoned at some point, and those who weren’t, were politically appointed charlatans like Lysenko, who in turn sent his own critics to prison camps. Most high level technical positions were filled with incompetent loyalists, ethnic Russians before any other nationality, and even those who knew something had to pretend to be dumb and just do as they were told.
Hm. As an European, I think a lot of the negative things could also be applied to the US.
Industrial espionage, for example. A lot was (is), um, being derived from inventions made in Germany or Europe as a whole.
The US American Fairchild F8 chip was basically based on blue prints being stolen from West Germany.
Details: https://www.cpushack.com/2013/06/08/cpu-of-the-day-fairchild-f8-microprocessor/
Then the “individual that couldn’t be replaced”.:
How often are people in the US are being fired after they had been encouraged to teach their assistant (successor) ?
Here in Europe there isn’t such a hire&fire culture.
Our employers do tend to keep their employees after many years of working together.
They’re not being fired ASAP for a young employee that’s a bit cheaper.
About former USSR. I’m not a big fan of USSR here and have no intentions to defend it,
but people over there had at least free healthcare and free education. 😉
People over there could go to university forever if they wanted to, basically.
Good education was considered a foundation or basic skill, not a luxury.
So it’s not that educated people automatically had been viewed as a threat to the system. Otherwise, 80% or so would have been.
Chess champions were very living very humble in USSR, while they had been super stars in the west.
To my understanding, in USSR, rather people with social connections were being looked up upon.
Sailors, taxi drivers, car mechanics, butchers etc. These were groups with connections and access to things, if I understand correctly.
That being said, I wasn’t living there. So I can’t speak from experience.
If we’re being sarcastic, we could argue that both USA and USSR took advantage of both Germanies to be succesful.
They both kidnapped the rocket scientists for their space programme.
East Germany developed micro electronics for the Soviet block, too.
Their U880, for example, was a “fixed” Z80 clone that had better specs than the American Zilog Z80! 😆
While West Germany had Siemens and developed excellent communications technology back then.
Last but not least, Olivetti from Italy had created the Olivetti M24,
which was sold in the US as AT&T 6300 and Xerox 6060.
It was better in performance and had higher specs than the US American IBM PC.
A later version cpuld even run Unix via an custom MMU, I vaguely remember.
Indeed, so long as they repeated the orthodoxy that was being taught and don’t question it. Going against the textbook was dangerous, even if the textbook was incomplete or wrong – and in the 50’s and 60’s it often was.
That’s also why mathematics was such a popular topic. It’s cheap, you don’t need much more than paper and pens, and you can’t BS in mathematics as you could with other topics because you have to prove your claims. Pure mathematics has no practical application or social relevance, so your academic achievements don’t catch the attention of the authorities. Writing novels and fiction, now that was a much more dangerous occupation.
If you can’t figure out the difference between being sent to the gulag and being fired, where you can still go look for another job…
The Soviets/Russian live was rough by our standard, no question.
But to us Europeans, the US American model of labour looks quite like modern slavery.
It’s all about profits and money, because that’s what’s needed in order to have a good living. In a world without worker rights and public healthcare.
Here in (most of) Europe, a job and money are very important, too of course, but it’s not the center of things.
People here also focus on family, hobbies, traditions, friends and things.
So they decide between good jobs and the other things, sometimes choosing the latter.
Sometimes, a “good job” isn’t all about the given salary, either.
A job that earns less but is satisfying and earns enough for living isn’t unattractive, either.
Consumption isn’t everything, either, although politics are obssessed with economic growth and such things.
Some people just want to live a happy life and become better people,
rather than become successful and start their own business.
For example what confuses us over here a bit a things like this:
In the US, places like MacMickeys or StarTrucks do currently replace furniture to make it more hostile.
So customers buy stuff and go away soon, so that the next buying customers have space.
Such, pardon, “sick” business practices are unheard of in other western countries.
Until now, I mean. It may change in the future, not sure.
Anyway, our Cafès and restaurant’s want paying customers to stay, they don’t try to throw them out ASAP.
Because the logic is different here. Places occupied by people do attract other people and are seen as good advertisement.
It increases the value of a location, thus.
Having loyal customers is nice, too.
To some, opening a restaurant or cafè isn’t about making money at all in first place but about fulfilling a dream.
They may live in a village or small town that they grow up in and love.
And the cafè, restaurant or cinema etc. is their contribution to a better life by providing a social meeting point.
Some really still have such naive, innocent dreams.
That being said, it’s not all rainbows and sunshine over here.
Many people struggle financially, as well and the cost of living is worrying us, too.
But there’s a cultural difference, really.
You perhaps can think of European/Western European life as it used to be somewhen in America of the 1950s to 1980s, maybe.
Before everything was measured by the profits.
It was rough by anyone’s standards, particularly for those occupied nations and peoples who weren’t ethnically Russian. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine… The whole system was still feudalism in structure, only upgraded for industrial production, all built to serve the Kremlin of Moscow.
The illusion and the excuse of the system was that it was the same all around – like everyone else had it just as bad – like the man commented in the video that “every society is the same”. Sure, you can identify similar features, but almost everyone else in the latter half of the 20th century were far better off in terms of intellectual freedom and individual rights, not to mention anything of what’s happened since the fall of the USSR.
Normal citizens (not narcomans, not criminals) had very good life life in USSR compared to poor people in Africa. Also, even in 1980s in many EU nations if you were from “undesirable” social caste you were de facto forbidden from attending university. So much for the DEI society eh?
Well my visits to Europe and discussions with residents there lead me to believe the “free” public healthcare, “free” child care, and as much education you can pursue to avoid actual work leads to soul crushing taxes. The current US system of insurance and healthcare is anything but a free market, but I’ll still take it over government run healthcare.
I was living in USSR until it stopped being USSR. And your understanding is quite close.
Regarding USSR failing in computers, this is mostly to do with two issue:
1) At a certain point cybernetics was considered a false science
2) Supply chain issues
My mother was working on a computer system, which was supposed to plan the whole manufacturing chain for the industry (the ultimate idea was to have a system which would allow to produce manufacturing plans for all the entities in the country). So, for example, they prepared the plans for optical crystals. It all starts with the minerals extraction, where you are supposed to get a certain quantity of the specific minerals with the specific quality characteristics. Then these minerals were supposed to be moved to another facility for processing. This processing facility is supposed to receive a certain quantity of minerals with the specific quality and output certain number of the different crystals with the different quality characteristics which will be sent to another facility. And so on. As you might guess the problem was in in the quality part. It was easy to meet the quantity goal, but it never matched the quality. And the whole supply chain had to deal with that.
That’s why simple Soviet-produced stuff (think AK-47 for example) was reliable as hell, while anything complex always had a reliability issues (i.e. you could a piece of complex equipment that would be reliable as hell, but the chances were high that you would get a defective equipment).
And since you had that reliability problem, it was very difficult to develop mass-produced complex equipment. Which is why quite often the Soviet Union resorted to reverse engineering and adopting foreign manufacturing schematics (it didn’t solve the reliability issue though). If the Soviet Union existed for a longer time, it would probably catch up and develop something unique (due to the specifics and need of the regime) solving the issue of reliability by overproducing, but that didn’t happen because the system itself was too complex to be managed by Politburo. It required the whole universities dedicated to the management of the system and required certain conditions on the ground to operate effectively (think Gulag but not for political stuff, but for business and economy stuff).
I think the Soviets also made a huge mistake, not adopting solid state circuitry in their electronics in the late 50s when everyone else did. But they had mixed results in the computer area. The Buran space shuttle was able to fly from blastoff to landing, via on board computers.
The reason why the Soviet theorists and rulers rejected cybernetics was because it involved the idea of feedback. The planners had the notion that they were on top of the system with a “God’s view” down below. All they needed was accurate reporting and total obedience, and they could find the right formula to run the entire thing. Balance inputs with outputs and everybody would be happy.
Cybernetics said no: even if you had perfect information and control, you could still run the society into an uncontrollable loop, and what’s worse you’d be more than likely to do so because your perfect information and perfect control was creating the feedback loop that keeps growing and oscillating chaotically. The more you try to control it, the more it runs away from you.
Of course they rejected the theory that said they were doing the wrong thing all along.
@James That’s one thing the Soviets did right, I think.
Tubes were both very forgiving and powerful, were going softly in saturation when being overloaded.
They were fine for RF front-ends and linear amps (finals).
The famous Japanese Yarsu FT-101 ham radio transceiver used a FET/Tube hybrid design for good reason.
Who knows what could have been if the West would have continued developing tube technology?
We may never know. The early solid-state obsession of the US ended life of Nuvistor and the termionic valve.
@James I forgot to mention, the US had the luck of having the 2N2222 transistor with the star architrcture.
https://semiconductormuseum.com/Transistors/Motorola/Haenichen/Haenichen_Index.htm
Transistors in other countries, even western ones, weren’t that great at the time.
Early Germanium transistors didn’t have high transit frequencies and were generally behind good battery tubes, often.
They also died quickly or became “deaf” if they were being overburdened.
That slowly changed during the 1970s, I think.
Nuvistors were still found up until the 1980s, though.
In high-end mic amps, in satellites, in spectrum analyzers etc.
It’s amazing how to think of it that 20+ years old nuvistors still were competing successfully with latest technology.
Again, what if the west didn’t have had given up upon tube technology..
“and even those who knew something had to pretend to be dumb and just do as they were told.”
Every society, West included, has topics which are not to be discussed “or else”.
For example, just look at all the people being “canceled”, which is similar to being declared “enemy of the people” in the USSR.
Also, your hypothesis doesn’t explain some areas of research in which USSR was ahead of the West. Forced labor doesn’t do that.
I made no claims about forced labor. It’s more like the old joke about making a cat eat mustard: the cat will eat mustard quite voluntarily if you slather it under its tail, because not eating it will be more painful.
The areas in which the USSR went ahead of the West, while they still could in the early stages of the cold war, were largely revolving around space technology. Of course the official Soviet history books make all sorts of claims, but the fact of the matter is they were left pretty far behind in pretty much everything through the 60’s and 70’s and never caught up.
With space technologies we also get very good examples of the “becoming too smart for your own good” effect: Sergei Korolev was a genius aircraft and rocket designer, and he was falsely accused of being an anti-Soviet counter-revolutionary and a saboteur, and sent to Siberia. Only problem was, all the other engineers were failing to make rockets that actually work, so they had to pull him out of prison after 6 years to get missiles for the military and basically the entire Soviet space program.
But they had to put him in prison first to show him his proper place. Just like the man who talked in the article’s video, who finally realized that he had gotten away lightly by simply being ignored and stonewalled. If he had kept pushing the point about the computer, rather than getting accepted, the Soviet system would have probably killed him for daring to raise his head.
Also, the cancel culture is a joke. It’s a phenomenon that exists mostly in the media business where the people are using it to backstab each other. It only really works in the media field, because cancelling someone has no meaning if publicity isn’t their business.
The fact that it’s on the media makes it seem like it’s really important and that everybody thinks this way, but it’s literally just wannabe celebrities and social entrepreneurs trying to raise heck for money and power.
Very true. Some topics that could get even naive curiosity into trouble in the west are stuff like
new economic systems
modelling common social hierarchies in business
The most dangerous animal in the world is a middle manager who has just figured out that they can hide their own incompetence and lack of purpose by focusing their efforts of criticizing the company’s diversity, inclusivity, accessibility, equality, etc. policy.
They cannot be criticized from above, because the company’s higher management must maintain good public relations outwards, and they cannot be criticized from below because they possess the power to fire or demote the critic.
In other words, people in the middle rungs of the social ladder have discovered that taking on the role of a saint gives them a moral shield to act like little shits. The particular topics that act as pressure points all revolve around solving someone else’s problems – not your own, but someone below you – and that gives you the moral authority to make demands.
Which is btw. very hilarious to note, since this was the entire point of Marxist-Leninist communism, or Bolshevism. Not communism through the self-governance of the actual people themselves, but through a vanguard of professional communists who have the authority to seize all power, because they’re working for the people.
In reality it was a movement invented by idle bourgeois upper class people who needed a reason and a role to exist in the new social order they were creating; something that wouldn’t turn them into beggars or force them into hard manual labor, having to live out in the boonies farming for sustenance. They wanted to keep their comfortable urban lives as intellectuals and upper class people while still pretending to be working for the people, so they created themselves a role: being the administrators and ultimately dictators of the new system.
All the cancel culture etc. you’re seeing around these days is a recycled version of the same. People trying to maintain position or gain higher social ground by pretending to help the people underneath them.
@Dude I might like to add that the words of Karl Marx had been somewhat twisted and being taken advantage of in Communism.
It’s often being forgotten that he used to be a philosopher,
when the US society basically portraits him as the devil himself.
In the same direction that Marx himself twisted them, or in the opposite? Because of Marx’s advocacy and use of dialectical reasoning, his claims are rather difficult to falsify or subject to testing, or to even understand what they actually meant.
As for the dialectical method, that’s just continuous re-framing and re-defining your terms and argumentation until it seems to resolve into a plausible answer, even if it’s just complete nonsense word salad – so far that it’s still grammatically correct.
Even Marx understood that his philosophical methods could be used to argue just about anything, and if I recall correctly he even stated so in one of his letters; that he “knew enough dialectics” to turn around the decisions of the committee he was talking to. He knew the whole thing was fundamentally sophistry on steroids.
Using a larger number base allows more basic operators – base 2 has add/subtract/mult/div. A larger base would have more potential functional operators. A richer function set might have interesting possibilities.
How does that work?
It doesn’t. Some CB-radio schizophrenic is posting random bs again.
its not right because an integer is always an integer in every base subject to the same add, subtract, divide multiply, but its not entirely wrong either.
there are calculations you can do easily in certain bases. consider the 9 times table, 9×2 is 18, 1 + 8 is 9, 9×3 is 27, 2+ 7 is 9. now that’s still decimal but i’m sure that if you look at the tables in other bases there will be patterns there, we just don’t have the experience yet to see the value of them
The babylonians used base 60 for computation, it’s why we have 60 seconds and 60 minutes, and some clocks use 60 thirds.
I’d like to hear about integers in base e. Thanks in advance.
I’m a schizo myself so not the right person to ask, but 19/7 is 2.714 so fairly close to e. I’m sure it’s possible to have a cpu process where computation is performed in fractions. it’s how we did math mentally for ages.
I’m not sure how, would you need a combination of base 19 cpu and base seven cpu with the calculations spread out across both.
maybe an analog cpu could handle base e exactly and not an approximation.
Should have trusted your first thought but thank you.
Not exactly sure what is forbidden about other kinds of computers, tertiary, analog, as those were built as part of R&D by many countries (Japan, for example).
Information is freely available on the same internet we all share, but I recall binary logic won for many unrelated reasons, one being relatively cheap scaling up, ie, going from, say, 8 bits to 16 bits did not require doubling the expenses/investments, and going from 16 bits to 32 bits was actually hardly noticed. As a side effect, forcing most R&D investments to go towards binary logic, NAND gates became the cheapest to bake into chips, classic catch22, once one direction became dominant, the rest became less profitable, so become niches.
As a side note, if I am to go down this rabbit hole (designing state machines) for something other than two (binary) base, I’d very much rather go straight to quad bits bypassing ternary.
Err, Elliot, there was an article about the same [Codeolences] video a month or so ago.
I’m not seeing that. Can you provide a link?
Sorry Elliot, I cannot find it. I am 90% sure I’ve got the link from the YT video from here. I’ve tried to use HaD search for the YT original poster (codeolences) but there are no results (even for current article). It may be the case that I got there watching another YT video on HaD, then next video was the Setun one.
Okay, cool. As a matter of practice we always search for an existing article before we write a new one, and my search didn’t turn up any pre-existing articles. So I’m not sure where you found the link but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t here at HaD. Thanks for keeping us on our toes!
https://github.com/brandonssmith/ternary
If anyone wants to okay with the ternary simulator that I put up on GitHub a couple of weeks ago. There are a few simulations you can run with it.
“TRITS”, following the abbreviation logic that yields “bit” from “binary digit”, I note that some pc idiot has inserted an ‘r’ into “trit”.
The reason why computers exist is because people wanted to watch big trits and throbbing clocks.