I often reflect that had the Ternary instead of the denary Notation been adopted in the Infancy of Society, machines something like the present would long ere this have been common, as the transition from mental to mechanical calculation would have been so very obvious and simple.One early calculating machine, built entirely from wood by Thomas Fowler in 1840, operated in balanced ternary.
[4][5][3] The first modern, electronic ternary computer, Setun, was built in 1958 in the Soviet Union at the Moscow State University by Nikolay Brusentsov,[6][7] and it had notable advantages over the binary computers that eventually replaced it, such as lower electricity consumption and lower production cost.
[6] In the United States, the ternary computing emulator Ternac working on a binary machine was developed in 1973.
The world's first unbalanced ternary semiconductor design on a large wafer was implemented by the research team led by Kim Kyung-rok at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea, which will help development of low power and high computing microchips in the future.
However, Donald Knuth argues that they will be brought back into development in the future to take advantage of ternary logic's elegance and efficiency.
[13] The Josephson junction has been proposed as a balanced ternary memory cell, using circulating superconducting currents, either clockwise, counterclockwise, or off.
"The advantages of the proposed memory circuit are capability of high speed computation, low power consumption and very simple construction with fewer elements due to the ternary operation.
"[14] Ternary computing shows promise for implementing fast large language models (LLMs) and potentially other AI applications, in lieu of floating point arithmetic.
[15] In Robert A. Heinlein's novel Time Enough for Love, the sapient computers of Secundus, the planet on which part of the framing story is set, including Minerva, use an unbalanced ternary system.
[16] With the emergence of Carbon nano tube transistors, many researches have shown interest in designing ternary logic gates using them.