The first
ternary computer,
Setun was built at
Moscow State University. Between
1956 and
1968 about 50
Setun computers were built, having been named after a
river near the campus by
designers Nikolai P. Brusentsov and colleagues.
Setun was an 18-trit machine, allowing work on numbers up to 387,420,489; this is the equivalent of a 29-bit machine. Unfortunately, Setun used two magnetic cores wired together such that they would have only three stable states; this hardware inefficiency did not take advantage of the base 3 radix economy. A binary computer would have been able to use the same cores to build a 36-bit computer.