This is basically my life

1, 0 and -1...
From what I ready in wiki, and remember from my BSc SE studies, it had advantages over the binary computers...

@nocgod yup, way faster, but it turned out to be impractical to manufacture

I don't get it… wouldn't you go from two values to four? Why doesn't powers of two apply here?

@calmyourtities Powers of two are only relevant in a binary system. Powers of three are relevant in a ternary system.

For base 2 (binary):

2^1=2 one-bit values:
0
1

2^2=4 two-bit values:
00
01
10
11

2^8=256 eight-bit values:
00000000
...
11111111

Now for base 3 (ternary):

3^1=3 one-ternary-digit values
0
1
2

3^2=9 two-ternary-digit values:
00
01
02
10
11
12
20
21
22

3^8=6561 eight-ternary-digit values
00000000
...
22222222

Now for base-10 (decimal):

10^1=10 one-digit values
0
...
9

10^2=100 two-digit values
00
...
99

10^8=100000000 eight-digit values
00000000
...
99999999

@calmyourtities or maybe you already knew what I just posted but were missing that those soviet computers used three voltage ranges to store their values instead of two voltage ranges like the vast majority of circuits have done.

And as @nocgod mentioned, these computers used "balanced ternary" where the three voltages represent -1, 0 and 1 instead of 0, 1 and 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The crazy thing is that this lets them represent negative numbers without writing a negative sign or coding something like a two's complement that signed integers need to use in modern computers.