Elara S. Novikova

[−1 0 +1]  Ternary Dreams

Ternary Dreams book cover
A companion to the novel

Ternary Dreams

The Third State of Feofanija

Kyiv, 2022: as Russian missiles fall, a historian decodes the three-state diaries of her grandmother, the woman who helped build Europe's first computer and was sent by the KGB to seduce an American.

"Between nought and one there is a third state. The Soviet Union invented it, loved it, and sawed it apart."
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The research behind the novel · explore it yourself

People

21 dossiers: the chief designers, the women history almost forgot, and the spy who became a Soviet institute director.

Machines

22 machines, languages and doomed proposals, from the monastery-built MESM to the ternary Setun that was sawed apart.

Network

Who mentored whom, who denounced whom, which machine was copied from which: 82 people, machines and institutes, 160 documented ties.

Timeline

650+ verified events on 25 parallel tracks: world history, East, West, and every protagonist's life. With four guided tours.

Map

86 journeys across half the globe, from a Kyiv monastery to Novosibirsk, and one spy's escape from New York to Leningrad.

On this day

What happened today in the history of Ternary Dreams? A fresh moment from the archive, every day.

The FLOPS Game

100 questions, from 50 ops/s to 1.742 ExaFLOPS. How far up the ladder of computing history will you climb?

The Book

A historical thriller about the third state between love and betrayal, and the untold history behind every page of this site.

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