Setun

Zeitun (Russian Сетунь ) was a building on balanced ternary logic computers, which was developed in the Soviet Union in 1958.

Description

The Zeitun computer was the world's only machine that on the principle of balanced ternary logic (-1, 0, 1) -based. He was ( agrochemicals, nuclear research, for example ) are used for teaching purposes and scientific tasks. 50 copies of the Zeitun were built in the 1960s and came in all union republics used. The computer was named after the river Zeitun, which flows near the Moscow State University.

History

The ternary computer Zeitun was developed from 1956 to 1958 by a team led by the Soviet radio engineer Nikolai Brussenzow. The will slowly equipped by the Second World War recovering economy and science in the country should be used with electronic computers for teaching and scientific applications. In 1956, some engineers and students of the conducted by Sergei Sobolev Computer Research Center of the Moscow State University, met in a seminar, in addition to Mikhail Shura - Bura, Konstantin Semendjajew and Yevgeny Schogolew also attended by the young Brussenzow at that.

In the following years, 50 computers in the factory were made for Mathematical Machines in Kazan at a price of 27,000 rubles. Although there was no official technical user support for the deployed throughout the Soviet Union at universities and in industrial production computer (including in Novosibirsk, Kaliningrad, Yakutsk, Ashkhabad, Magadan, Odessa, Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk, Dushanbe, Makhachkala ), ran the Zeitun mostly error-free, according to Nikolai Brussenzow. He and his team developed in 1970 the successor Zeitun 70 However, favored the State Planning Committee Gosplan other projects and the development was eventually discontinued.

In the USA and Canada research has been conducted to ternary components. However, the latest was in the early 1970s that the development of ternary elements in view of the already well-advanced binary technology was too expensive. The computing capacity increased compared to the beginning of the sixties to such an extent that ternary arithmetic operations could be emulated easily on binary computers.

Technical specification

Zeitun is constructed sequentially and has a RAM of iron cores ( core memory ) with three sides each 54 words. The magnetic drums work with the RAM as a cache together. The content of the index register, depending on the value of the address Modifizierungstrits ( , 0, - ) to be subtracted from the address portion is added to the instruction or. The instruction set consists of only 24 commands that enable the following functions: 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: Istoriia vychislitel'noj TEKHNIKI v licakh. Kiev, 1995
• Brusencov, NP: Malaya cifrovaja vychislitel'naja mashina " Zeitun ", Moskva, Univ, 1965.
• Rumjanzev, Dmitri: Down with the bytes! An Interview with N. P. Brusenzov. Upgrade 33 (175 ), August, 2004, ( in Russian)
• Žogolev, YA: The order code and at interpretive system for the computer- Zeitun. USSR Comp. Math and Math Physics (3 ), 1962, Oxford, Pergamon Press, p 563-578
• G. Trogemann, AY Nitussov, W. Ernst ( ed.): Computing in Russia: The History of Computer Devices and Information Technology revealed. Vieweg Verlag, July 2001 ( in English )
• Hunger, Francis: Zeitun. A research on the Soviet Ternärcomputer. Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig, 2007, ISBN 3-932865-48-0 ( German, English )