Three is the magic number as first off-the-shelf general-purpose ternary hardware since c 1965 lands

The 5500FP is a ternary CPU implemented on an FPGA. It's not very fast, but it makes it easier to experiment with computers that don't use binary.

Independent researcher Claudio Lorenzo La Rosa recently published 5500FP: A 24-Trit Balanced Ternary RISC Processor. The paper is quite technical, but it's only seven pages long. It describes how to implement a ternary procesor on a conventional binary-based FPGA:

We present the 5500FP, a 24-trit balanced ternary RISC processor implemented on FPGA, with a 120-instruction ISA, native atomic synchronization primitives, and an open hardware development board. The design demonstrates the practical feasibility of balanced ternary computing on modern reconfigurable hardware, providing a concrete platform for research into non-binary architectures without the barrier of custom silicon development.

There's no inherent reason computers have to encode everything in binary. The natural world is more subtle than just "on" or "off". Another ...