According to Wikipedia:

The first modern, electronic ternary computer, Setun, was built in 1958 in the Soviet Union at the Moscow State University by Nikolay Brusentsov,[4][5] and it had notable advantages over the binary computers that eventually replaced it, such as lower electricity consumption and lower production cost.[4] In 1970 Brusentsov built an enhanced version of the computer, which he called Setun-70.[4] In the United States, the ternary computing emulator Ternac working on a binary machine was developed in 1973.[6]:22

The ternary computer QTC-1 was developed in Canada.[7]

Doesn't seem like they caught on otherwise, though.

Niklas

Den ons 3 feb. 2021 kl 21:10 skrev Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org>:
On Wed, 3 Feb 2021, Peter Jeremy wrote:

> I'm not sure that 16 (or any other 2^n) bits is that obvious up front.
> Does anyone know why the computer industry wound up standardising on
> 8-bit bytes?

Best reason I can think of is System/360 with 8-bit EBCDIC (Ugh!  Who said
that "J" should follow "I"?).  I'm told that you could coerce it into
using ASCII, although I've never seen it.

> Scientific computers were word-based and the number of bits in a word is
> more driven by the desired float range/precision.  Commercial computers
> needed to support BCD numbers and typically 6-bit characters. ASCII
> (when it turned up) was 7 bits and so 8-bit characters wasted ⅛ of the
> storage.  Minis tended to have shorter word sizes to minimise the amount
> of hardware.

Why would you want to have a 7-bit symbol?  Powers of two seem to be
natural on a binary machine (although there is a running joke that CDC
boxes has 7-1/2 bit bytes...

I guess the real question is why did we move to binary machines at all;
were there ever any ternary machines?

-- Dave