Setun

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Setun ( Russian Сетунь ) was a computer based on balanced ternary logic , which was developed in 1958 in the Soviet Union .

description

The Setun computer was the only computer in the world that was based on the principle of balanced ternary logic (−1, 0, 1). It was used for teaching purposes and scientific tasks (e.g. agrochemistry , nuclear research). 50 copies of the Setun were built in the 1960s and were used in all Union republics . The computer was named after the Setun River , which flows near Moscow's Lomonosov University .

history

The ternary computer Setun was developed from 1956 to 1958 by a team led by the Soviet radio engineer Nikolai Brussenzow . The country's economy and science, slowly recovering from World War II, should be equipped with electronic computers for teaching and scientific applications. In 1956, some engineers and students from the Computer Research Center at Moscow's Lomonosov University, headed by Sergei Sobolev , met in a seminar in which the young Brusenzov also took part , along with Mikhail Shura-Bura , Konstantin Semendjajew and Yevgeny Shogolev .

In the following years, 50 computers were manufactured in the computer systems factory in Kazan at a unit price of 27,000 rubles. Although there was no official technical user support for the computer used in universities and in industrial production throughout the Soviet Union (including in Novosibirsk , Kaliningrad , Yakutsk , Ashkhabad , Magadan , Odessa , Irkutsk , Krasnoyarsk , Dushanbe , Makhachkala ), it was running According to Nikolai Brusenzov, Setun was mostly flawless. In 1970 he and his team developed the successor model Setun 70 . However, the Gosplan State Planning Committee favored other projects and development was eventually stopped.

Research into ternary components was also carried out in the USA and Canada. However, by the early 1970s at the latest, it became clear that the development of ternary components was becoming too expensive in view of the already well-advanced binary technologies. Compared to the early sixties, computing capacities increased so much that ternary computing operations could be emulated on binary computers without any problems .

Technical specification

Setun is built up sequentially and has a ferrite core memory with three pages of 54 words each . The magnetic drums work together with the RAM as a cache . The contents of the index register can be added to or subtracted from the address part of the instruction , depending on the value of the address modification string (+, 0, -). The instruction set consists of only 24 instructions. a. The following functions enable: mantissa normalization for floating point calculation, shift, combined multiplication and addition.

credentials

  • Klimenko, Stanislav V .: Computer science in Russia: A personal view. IEEE Annals of the history of computing, v 21, n 3, 1999 (in English)
  • Malinovski, BN: Istorija vychislitel'noj tekhniki v licakh . Kiev, 1995
  • Brusencov, NP: Malaja cifrovaja vychislitel'naja mashina "Setun" , Moskva, Univ., 1965
  • Rumjanzev, Dmitri: Down with the bytes! An interview with NP Brusenzov. Upgrade 33 (175), August, 2004, (in Russian)
  • Žogolev, YA: The order code and an interpretative system for the Setun computer . USSR Comp. Math. And Math. Physics (3), 1962, Oxford, Pergamon Press, p 563-578
  • G. Trogemann, AY Nitussov, W. Ernst (eds.): Computing in Russia: The History of Computer Devices and Information Technology revealed . Vieweg Verlag, July 2001 (in English)
  • Hunger, Francis: Setun. A research on the Soviet ternary computer . University of Graphics and Book Art Leipzig, 2007, ISBN 3-932865-48-0 (German, English)
  • Donald E. Knuth: Seminumerical Algorithms . In: The Art of Computer Programming . 3. Edition. tape 2 . Addison-Wesley, 2006, ISBN 0-201-89684-2 , pp. 208 .
  • Nikolay Petrovich Brusentsov, José Ramil Alvarez: Ternary Computers: The Setun and the Setun 70 . In: Perspectives on Soviet and Russian Computing: First IFIP WG 9.7 Conference, SoRuCom 2006, Petrozavodsk, Russia, July 3-7, 2006, Revised Selected Papers . 2011, p. 74-80 , doi : 10.1007 / 978-3-642-22816-2_10 ( PDF ).

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Nikolay Petrovich Brusentsov, José Ramil Alvarez: Ternary Computers: The Setun and the Setun 70 . In: J. Impagliazzo, E. Proydakov (Eds.): SoRuCom 2006, IFIP AICT 357 . IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2011, pp. 74-80 (accessed May 9, 2016).

Web links