The Soviets had ternary computers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun

Then they decided to abandon their indigenous technology in favour of copying Western designs

There was a very good reasons for it, indigenous designs were obsolete by the time they left the drawing boards and countless design bureaus cost stupid amounts of money while producing dozens of incompatible computers. By the time they decided to adopt ES EVM they lagged by some 5 years and continued to lag further behind.

Setun apparently used two bits to represent a ternary value, wasting the 4th state.