Elara S. Novikova
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Setun-70

1970 · Machine / system

Ternary two-stack successor; remained a single specimen

Setun-70 in the timeline

1968 Setun-70 specification approved

The successor Setun-70 is approved as MGU's 'production gift' for Lenin's centenary. Brusentsov must write the test programs himself; the programmer Jose Ramil Alvarez, son of Spanish Civil War refugees, becomes his decisive helper and lifelong collaborator.

1970 Setun-70 finished, then banned from computers

The Setun-70, with its unusual two-stack architecture ideal for structured programming ('true RISC can only be ternary'), remains a single specimen. The new computing center head deems MGU no place for computer building, the rector calls Brusentsov's research pseudoscience, and computer development is forbidden to him by administrative order. The lab is bani

1970 Setun-70 implements structured programming in hardware

Brusentsov's successor machine introduces the 'tryte' (6 trits) and a two-stack architecture realizing Dijkstra's structured programming in hardware. After it, ternary research ends; the West never built a production ternary computer at all.

1974-03-01 Teaching system Nastavnik first tested

On the attic-exiled Setun-70, the team builds the computer-aided teaching system Nastavnik ('Mentor'), first tried with about 150 third-semester students in a numerical methods course. Based on Comenius' pedagogy and the principle 'computer plus book', it spreads to schools as far as Sofia and survives in PC form to this day.

1986 Silver medal for the DSSP language

Brusentsov receives the VDNKh silver medal for the Dialogue System of Structured Programming, developed in the early 1980s, which carries the ternary two-stack ideas of the Setun-70 onto binary mini- and microcomputers. Years earlier he had survived cancer deemed hopeless, operated on by the famous surgeon Petrovsky and nursed devotedly by his wife Natalia K

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