[ih] bits, was bytes [Re: "network unix"]

[Jack Haverty]

Back in the 60s, as a student project in "Digital Systems Lab" at MIT, I
built a very primitive "computer" using ternary logic.  Each bit could
have 3 values: +1, 0, -1 which reflected direction, or absence, of
current flow in the transistors involved.

Seemed like a good idea at the time.  Fortunately the idea lost favor
before we had to figure out how to network computers....what a mess that
would have been.

Google "ternary computer".

>From 1958 (a ternary computer in Russia!) through today's qubits...a bit
is not always a bit!  Of course, if you consider "bit" to be a shortened
term for "binary digit", then those other non-binary things were "bit
like things" with no specific name that I recall.

Perhaps we would have had tri-valued "ternits"?   And to mirror the
"nibbles" of half-bytes, we would have had .... "tribbles"!

Star Trek was very prescient....

/Jack


On 10/10/2016 11:59 AM, John Levine wrote:
>> The size of a bit has stayed fairly constant.
>> So has the number of bits in a bit.
> 
> Depends how far back you go.  According to my handy IBM 650 manual,
> each digit was represented in bi-quinary, where there was one group
> with five, uh, bit like things representing 0-4 and another group with
> two things representing 0 and 5.  Error checking logic checked that
> exactly one thing in each group was on.
> 
> So they were sort of like bits, but not really.
> 
> Helpfully,
> John
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