The 5500FP is a ternary CPU implemented on an FPGA. It's not very fast, but it makes it easier to experiment with computers that don't use binary. Independent researcher Claudio Lorenzo La Rosa ...

In 1958, while the rest of the computing world was busy teaching machines to think in ones and zeros like obedient little digital soldiers, a group of Soviet engineers looked at binary logic and said, ...

The Babylonians used separate combinations of two symbols to represent every single number from 1 to 59. That sounds pretty confusing, doesn’t it? Our decimal system seems simple by comparison, with ...

Three, as Schoolhouse Rock! told children of the 1970s, is a magic number. Three little pigs; three beds, bowls and bears for Goldilocks; three Star Wars trilogies. You need at least three legs for a ...

Ternary computing relies on three-state “trits” rather than two-state bits. Despite this system’s advantages, it is rarely used. A classic "Futurama" episode has robot Bender waking from a nightmare: ...

Your computer uses ones and zeros to represent data. There’s no real reason for the basic unit of information in a computer to be only a one or zero, though. It’s a historical choice that is common ...