On Fri, 19 Sep 2014 20:07:20 -0700, Tom Brennan wrote:
>Just wondering what would happen if I had a machine with 16 discreet
>states per wire or connection (using different voltage levels, colors,
>frequencies, or whatever). On such a machine there would be no binary
>bits, so the lowest data type might really be hex.
>
The Soviets experimented with ternary computers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_computer
And 56 KB/sec modems achieved that throughput on an 8KBaud connection
by providing 128 different states (for 7 bits) at each analog signaling event.
(Often, under noisy conditions, they'd fall back to lower rates.)
-- gil
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