The Soviets had ternary computers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun

Then they decided to abandon their indigenous technology in favour of copying Western designs

There was a very good reasons for it, indigenous designs were obsolete by the time they left the drawing boards and countless design bureaus cost stupid amounts of money while producing dozens of incompatible computers. By the time they decided to adopt ES EVM they lagged by some 5 years and continued to lag further behind.

Conversely, the Soviet Union took the PDP-11 ISA to its limits... including home computers with framebuffers and programmable calculators.

Setun apparently used two bits to represent a ternary value, wasting the 4th state.

We call that 1.58 bit now..

It already exists: True, False and FileNotFound.

If you don't believe me, just ask Paula Bean.

Paula Bean? Mr Bean photoshopped?

https://scontent-lax3-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/476277134...

And https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Brillant_Paula_Bean

on, off, and the other thing

hi-z is one choice. Though I don't know how well that does past a certain speed.

It works poorly at any speed. Hi-Z is an undriven signal, not a specific level, so voltage-driven logic like (C)MOS can't distinguish it from an input that's whatever that signal happens to be floating at. In current-driven logic like TTL or ECL, it's completely equivalent to a lack of current.

I wasn't pitching it as a solid commercial idea. Just that you can get (perhaps fiddly) three states out into the real world with something cheap that already exists. Like: https://idle-spark.blogspot.com/2015/04/low-cost-n-ary-dacs-...

Using 8 way quadrature and high-z, you have 16 values packed into 1 quasi-hexalogic gate. May your hydration prove fruitful.

null :)

On, off, and ooh shiny!

True, False and file not found

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/What_Is_Truth_0x3f_

But with 5 valued electronics, Up, down, left, right and charm...

You could have the equivalent of 45-bit numbers ( 44 + parity ). And you could have the operands of two 15 bit numbers and their result encoded in 9 quint-bits or quits. Go pro or go home.

But, but, what about Strange?

Technically e would be best IIRC, but hard to implement, so 3 is the closest.