Down that far, I start to wonder if trinary circuits might become useful again.
fp4 with 1-3-0 would mean 27 values if the first bit were interpreted as binary. But--and an engineer should check me on this cause to me a transistor is a distant abstraction--I think you could double that to 54 values if you were clever with the sign bit and arithmetic circuitry. Maybe push it to 42 if only some of my intuition is wrong.
"At that time [1955], transistors were not yet available, but it was clear that the machine should not use vacuum tubes. Tubes have a short lifespan, and tube-based machines were idle most of the time because they were always being repaired. A tube machine worked at best for several hours, then it was necessary to look for another malfunction. Yuli Izrailevich Gutenmakher built the LEM-1 machine on ferrite-diode elements. The thought occurred to me that since there are no transistors, then you can try to make a computer on these elements. Sobolev, whom everyone respected very much, arranged for me to go on an internship with Gutenmacher. I studied everything in detail. Since I am a radio engineer by education, I immediately saw that not everything should be done the way they did it. The first thing I noticed is that they use a pair of cores for each bit, one working and one compensating. And an idea came to my mind: what if we make the compensation core do work, as well? Then each cell becomes three-state. Consequently, the number of cores in Setun was seven times less than in LEM-1."
But why? There's nothing special about having 4 storage elements. If you want 54 values then 6 bits are going to be just as effective as 4 trits, and easier to implement in every way.
fp4 with 1-3-0 would mean 27 values if the first bit were interpreted as binary. But--and an engineer should check me on this cause to me a transistor is a distant abstraction--I think you could double that to 54 values if you were clever with the sign bit and arithmetic circuitry. Maybe push it to 42 if only some of my intuition is wrong.