These are interesting for a variety of reasons, one of those reasons being DSSP, Dialog System for Structured Programming. You can think of it as a bit of a bizarro, Russian, independently-discovered FORTH.
This is such a strange way of building logic. Makes you wonder what "could have been" if this had actually taken off. Actual supply chains would have been very similar but still different.
If you've never multiplied numbers in balanced ternary, work out the algorithm and try it on some simple numbers. It's a real pleasure.
The sense in which it's “optimal” is that if you consider a one-hot encoding for each digit, well, for numbers up to a quintillion you need 18×10=180 vacuum tubes in base 10 (like that abortion the ENIAC), 2×60=120 in base 2, and only 3×39=117 in balanced ternary. If your base 2 is also signed, the crossover happens earlier (you need 122 vacuum tubes in that case), but either way, it's not a large difference.
Still, there are a number of things that come out pleasingly simpler in balanced ternary: in addition to multiplication, there are comparison results, rounding (as mentioned in the linked paper), numerical type ranges, and negation. It's easy to imagine a world where ternary had come out on top.
This sounds like lookahead carry, but in balanced ternary, carry can be either positive or negative, so you still need extra trit lines for lookahead carry.
If Samuel Morse had understood electricity better, Morse code would have been ternary.
English precursors to his telegraph had three states, positive, negative, and zero current flow. They had automatic transcription, too, using an electric spark to blacken a spot on, above, or below a line.
But Morse had better access to capital, so his design won. There must be some kind of lesson in that.
Maybe if someone manages to realize a qutrit, the mistake could be rectified, and we could blossom into the glorious ternary future.
Radio was far in the future, but radio is quite versatile, so it would not have been a problem.
Ternary would have been easy enough to learn, telegraphers being even more versatile than radios, but the actual need for human telegraphers is another artifact of Morse's design. Automated and faster communication would have developed naturally, without, which might have delayed development of fixed-length codes like baudot and ascii.
Edison might then not have got his start (as a telegrapher), and maybe Tesla would not have encountered such opposition to his alternating-current electrical system, and not have ended up turning it over to what became General Electric, for free.
An incomplete DSSP interpreter:
https://github.com/beadleha/libreDSSP
A complete one, but entirely in Russian:
https://github.com/trinarium/DSSP-C
Previously, on Hacker News:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...