About

The T729 Balance Ternary Computer is a hobby project that I have slowly been working on since 2012. It started as a thought experiment and was a day dream project during boring college classes.

I've wanted to make some kind of DIY breadboard or discrete component computer for a while but there is already an ocean of hobby 8 and 16 bit projects out there. I wanted to do something different. A base3 computer seemed like a cool idea.

During college I figured out on my own on paper the truth tables for the logic gates SUM, CONS, and ANY and made a full adder; proving a ternary computer was possible. Soon after I discovered the website The Ternary Manifesto by Douglas W. Jones https://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~dwjones/ternary/ This provided a strong foundation for my project.

There seems to be very little publicly accessible information on balanced ternary computing that I can easily find. Most of it is behind paywalls.

Because there is so little useful information I have had to self teach myself how binary computers and logic do things and then recreate it with balanced ternary logic myself.

I originally went to College for Computer Science but it was ALL programming classes and then I struggled with the required higher English and Math classes so much I switched to Electronics which didn't have the higher requirements. I learned a lot more in the electronics classes and it was much more hands on and fun.

I now have an AS in Electronics but my work background is still computers; IT tech support and computer repair.

Other hobbies are programming and messing with small Arduino/ESP32 projects. Built a Raspberry Pi robot that can be viewed and driven over the internet in a web browser. Dabble with Blender 3D making 3d models for 3d printing and rendered stills and animations. Running a small "Homelab" that I host video game servers on for friends and myself.