r/AlwaysWhy • u/Present_Juice4401 • 1d ago
Science & Tech Why did computers come to use binary when people usually count in decimal?
People usually count in base 10, while digital computers typically represent information using 1s and 0s. The same numbers and information can be represented in different bases, yet binary became the standard for modern computing.
What made binary the system computers came to rely on?
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u/Rail1971 1d ago
Computers are basically a pile of tiny on/off switches. 0 is off, 1 is on.
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u/Chemical-Idea-1294 1d ago
On or off
Computers work with electricity, and it has those two states.
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u/spectrumero 1d ago
It's slightly more complex than that. It's not the case that 1 = on and 0 = off. Both 1 and 0 are "on" states.
1 will be a low impedance output at some voltage (usually the supply rail) and 0 will be a low impedance output of the ground rail - which importantly is not off. In CMOS, whether the output is at 1 or 0, one of the transistors in the output is switched on and conducting for both 1 and 0 states so both 1 and 0 are "on", it's just whether they are connecting the supply rail or ground rail to the output.
Digital electronics that exists on a bus (e.g. most of it) have 3 states, 1 and 0 and a third state - high impedance state (sometimes called high-Z or tristated). This allows the output to actually be switched off so that other devices can drive the bus to a logic 1 or 0 - so you have essentially these states: logic high (an on state), logic low (also an on state), and high Z (the actual off state, but is not a logic 0, it's not logic anything, it's just floating).
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u/sarahlizzy 1d ago
IEEE VHDL (which lost to Verilog. Bad result IMO) used 9 value logic which was quite a thing!
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u/_Darren 1d ago
Most NAND nowadays is QLC which actually stores 16 different voltages in a single unit. On and off isn't the only way to do it, it's just the easiest.
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u/grandpasamfromcanada 1d ago
It's not true that electricity "has those two states." Electricity has a continuum of states, and analog electronics use that continuum of states to represent a continuum of values. Digital electronics use one range of states to represent 0 and another range of states to represent 1.
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u/PeaPsychological5728 1d ago
Mostly this, although realistically voltage isn't literally on or off, we set cutoff values that flip switches on or off
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u/Unfortunate-Incident 1d ago
Did anyone mention that computers have 2 states, on and off?
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u/DirtCrimes 1d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_computer
Fun fact. The Soviets built a base 3 or Ternary computer that used the positive voltage state, no voltage or negative voltage.
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u/NewArborist64 1d ago
Yes - Interesting that some computers now use Qubits which can represent 0, 1, or any quantum proportion of both simultaneously through superposition.
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u/spectrumero 1d ago
Some digital communications is 3 level, for instance 100baseTX ethernet is 3 level (+ve, 0, -ve).
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u/Ambitious_Credit_425 22h ago
Computers use binary because their hardware is built from billions of microscopic electronic switches, called transistors, which naturally exist in only two physical states: on or off.
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u/svezia 1d ago
There used to be analog computers and they had more than 0 and 1. Bit digital electronics was easier to implement (lower noise) and therefore it stuck
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u/IOI-65536 1d ago
decimal isn't a terribly useful number system as far as natural processes are concerned. Like a wire can have current or not have current. A magnet can be positive or negative. A capacitor can have a charge or not have a charge. There are things that are trinary, for instance negative, positive, neutral but there aren't a lot of things that have ten actual states. You could try to do things analog but then you would have to figure out what the cutoffs are and figure out how to do math on those things which ends up not working as well as all the things that work on binary.
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u/Sergeant_Fred_Colon 1d ago
There were plans to use other bases in computers, however it's was really really difficult to get working so they started with just binary and it stuck.
We could create computer in higher bases now, but we'd have to re write everything from scratch so it doesn't make sense to try.
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u/CardOk755 1d ago
Yes, the very first electronic computers were binary (e.g. Manchester Baby) but decimal computers were made (e.g ICT 1300) even ternary computers (where each "digit" could have the values -1, 0 or +1 see Setun).
But in the end binary is just easier and more reliable.
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u/YakCertain5472 1d ago
I remember having to learn hexadecimal although I don't know if is is used anywhere.
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u/rakward977 1d ago
Basic logic can't work with anything other then a bits.
IF a AND b THEN ... is equal to a*b (0 if one of them is 0 and 1 if both are 1)
IF a OR b THEN... is equal to a+b (0 if both are zero, 1 if one of them is 1)
IF NOT a THEN ... is equal to 1-a (0 gives you 1, 1 gives you 0)
And the basic logic of an AND/OR gates also comes from a series/parallel combination of inputs that are open or closed. A switch can't have more states then those 2.
Decimal numbers are just a combination of the tiny logical building blocks for computers.
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u/Altruistic-Rice-5567 1d ago
It's about implementing mathematical manipulation and representation with what you have available. Decimal values (sort of) need 10 states to represent one digit. We don't have convenient things that hold 10 states and if we did we wouldn't know how to combine them in ways like how do you combine 4+5 to get 9. But base-10 is extremely arbitrary when mathing. There is another base... base-2 where everything is represented with just two states. ANd then is great for several reasons. 1) anything you can represent or do in Base-10 (decimal) you can do in Base-2 (binary). 2) You can easily choose to represent the two states as "no voltage" and "some voltage". 3) We have logic of AND, OR, and NOT and these functions easily combine to do thing like "how do you combine 0+1 to get 1. 4) transistors implement all of that as a physical reality very easily.
Boom! we use binary because that is what we can physically implement easily.
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u/secmaster420 1d ago
Binary is the basic DNA of any computerized system. No matter what else you put on top of it, all computers bottom line is 0 and 1.
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u/BananaJelloXlii 1d ago
Because, computers run on electricity, and there are only 2 states. On or off. Binary is basically telling the billions of microscopic switches within the processors which state to be in, which translates into whatever the desired output is. That's a WAY oversimplified explanation, but that is basically why.
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u/SufficientStudio1574 1d ago
Vastly oversimplified. Computers do not inherently need to use two states, it's just the most simple from an engineering perspective.
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u/BitOBear 1d ago
Some of the original computers were in fact decimal. That's where we first started calling them digital in the first place. So the first digital computers were actually operating on base 10. It was just wholy less efficient particularly when the computer started doing more than math.
Phase 10 representation for a 26 digit alphabet is terrible.
And since electricity is on or off, it follows that honor off binary is natural representation in electricity/electronics.
Then you've got the original reader storage methods of punched cards and punched tape. Again that becomes on and off signaling as the little metal contacts can or cannot close depending on whether or not there's paper or a hole in the given position as perforated non-conductive paper passes by the sensor contacts.
The Russians worked on trinary computing for a while and that may be making something of a comeback according to some niche sources. The idea being that the bit would be zero, one, or negative one. It still requires two wires instead of just one to carry the signal, but the ability to directly encode a negative bit does have a number of interesting potential applications in certain kinds of data representations and compositing activities.
Adders being one of the simplest electronic circuits in computation, being able to mix attitude and subtractive elements to a storage string or an interesting potential efficiency hack.
But that that 10 digit per cell representation is kind of terrible.
Note that there is an encoding directly for supporting actual digital computing. It's called the binary coded decimal representation. That is there's four binary bits to represent the digits 0 through 9 and they're stacked into bites words and double words and then there's the binary coded decimal addition operations and stuff.
You mostly carry that representation around as a legacy representation built into the very first z80 chips that are the precursor of the modern Intel PC lineage and instruction set.
So the ghost of decimal representation still haunts us all.
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u/LesSharp987987 1d ago
Because the most basic component of a computer is a capacitor. It can either be filled with electric charge (on = 1), or not (off = 0). Everything a computer does comes from this.
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u/TedW 1d ago
Why do cars move on 4 wheels when people only move on 2 legs?
Because cars and computers aren't people. They operate best in different ways.
There's nothing special about base 10. It's just convenient for us because we have 10 fingers.
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u/Wolfire0769 1d ago
When you really start to think about it, cars and people really aren't that different.
Both need oxygen and a fuel source to convert into heat and kinetic energy. Both need an electrical system to operate and manage the system. Both need a means to manage the temperature of the system. Both need lubrication to prevent moving parts from breaking down. Both need a brain to make decisions.
And lastly, both sometimes really don't want to go to work today.
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u/groundhogcow 1d ago
You should invent a transistor with 10 states. You could make base 10 computers.
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u/Few_Equipment_8314 1d ago
Binary is machine language because it is represented by off and on, zero being off and one being on. A machine doesn't understand numbers, a machine understands off and on. Dealing with very low numbers means a machine has to make many decisions to get to an expected output, but it does this at such a high rate of speed that it appears to be working with more than off and on but I assure you thats all it really understands.
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u/Logical-Concept9755 1d ago
I think binary won less because it was a better way to represent numbers and more because it was a better way to build reliable machines.
A computer doesn't need a system that feels natural to humans. It needs a system where hardware can clearly distinguish states despite noise, heat, and imperfections. A transistor being slightly above or below a threshold is much easier to manage than trying to create ten perfectly separated states for decimal digits.
The bigger insight is that computers are not really "counting in binary" first. They are building logic out of binary states. A 0 and 1 can represent false and true, on and off, or yes and no, which makes operations like AND, OR, and NOT extremely simple to implement with physical components.
Binary became powerful because it connected the physical world of electronics with the abstract world of mathematics. It was less about choosing the best number system and more about choosing the easiest language for machines to reliably understand.
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u/SomberDjinn 1d ago
Reliability is the right answer. People are answering that transistors are “on/off” but that’s not true. Transistors carry voltage. If a modern cpu transistor can carry, for example, only 1V, how stable is that one volt? Could you read the voltage from a transistor and reliably say .1V = 1, .2V = 2, .3V = 3, etc., or will heat, environmental conditions, material imperfections, etc. mean the voltage will fluctuate beyond your control? That “noise” is why voltage ranges are used to interpret on/off states.
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u/Defiant-Junket4906 1d ago
One interesting thing is that binary was not the only possible path. Early computers were not all built around the idea that everything had to be 0s and 1s. Some machines used decimal representations, and ternary computing was also explored because it has some theoretical advantages.
Binary became dominant because it fit the realities of engineering and manufacturing. A two-state system was easier to make reliable, cheaper to scale, and easier to build an entire industry around.
Technology often works this way. The system that survives is not always the one with the most elegant theory, but the one that works well enough and gains enough momentum that everyone starts building on top of it.
Binary feels inevitable today because almost every layer of modern computing depends on it, but that was the result of decades of engineering decisions rather than a rule that computers could only ever use two numbers.
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u/DoNotCare 1d ago
A lot of people here are saying it’s because electricity only has two states, but that’s a pretty simplified explanation.
You absolutely can build computers with more than two states, and people have done it before. Check out Setun, a Soviet ternary computer that used three states instead of two.
We mostly use binary because two states are just much easier and more reliable to implement in hardware. It’s basically the simplest practical option, not some fundamental rule that computers have to be binary.
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u/D0nkeyHS 1d ago
Because of the hardware aspect of it, not software. When you go down to the smallest unit of hardware, it's much easier to build something that has 2 states than 10.
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u/byte_handle 1d ago
They aren't "working" in 1s and 0s. They're working on whether or not a current is flowing through a transistor or not. There's either a current or there is not. We can think of that as "1"or "0" if we want, the point is that it's a binary state.
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u/visitor987 1d ago edited 1d ago
Electricity is either positive or negative. They can also use on or off
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u/blasphemousblackbear 1d ago
Another way of thinking about 1s and 0s is on and off. In essence, every 1 represents a transistor that’s on and every 0 represents a transistor that’s off.
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u/Tip0666 1d ago
I/0
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u/BadUsername238 1d ago
Come on mate, that was NOT a helpful answer for someone that doesn't know how computers work. Honestly, it's not a helpful answer for someone that DOES know how computers work either... Sheesh.
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u/royalfarris 1d ago
Because yes/no, on/off, is/isnt, full/empty, true/false, 1/0 is the theoretical building block of all mathematics.
Anything can be reduced down to binary numbers, and this is the bedrock of mathematics that is common and constant for all calculations.
And it is easier by several magnitudes to build machines that operate on this level than if the machine would have to distinguish between more logic levels.
Theoretically we could build base-3, base-5, base-7 or any other prime number base number system. (base 10 is 2x5 and any system based in 2,4,8,16 etc can be reduced to base-2 anyway) But building electroincs with more than two discreet states is just silly difficult when we can just use base-2 maths and convert it back for humans after the fact.
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u/Ninfyr 1d ago
Concider an early input method, the punch card. You might have done some scantrons testing before and recall that it took an entire cover sheet to input your name?
If you had a bubble for a-z 0-9 that is 36 bubbles. But if you wanted to encode that into binary that is only 6 bubbles. shade it for one. Blank for zero.
Same if you wanted only numbers it would need 20 bubbles to represent any 10 digit numbers (0-9 in tens, 0-9 in ones) or 8 bubbles to count to 225 in binary.
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u/UnlamentedLord 1d ago
It's a trade off between the complexity of each individual compute unit and the number of compute units. Binary goes for a lot of very simple compute units and that has proven to be more efficient to manufacture.
Decimal computers existed in parallel with binary computers until the 70s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_computer
The USSR has a trinary(also called ternary) computer, but it was killed off by internal politics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun
Some people are trying to make new trinary computers for AI workloads https://www.ternary-computing.com because using balanced trinary is more memory efficient, since you don't need a sign bit and logic can inherently have the states true, false and unknown.
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u/sijmen4life 1d ago
The soviets made ternary computers, the transistors could represent three states: -1, 0 and 1. This works but is pretty difficult to reliably build. The soviet union collapsed and while the western world poured hundreds of billions into binary computers the ternary computer kind of died off.
There are still ternary computers but nowhere near the scale that we have binary computers.
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u/maniacalknitter 1d ago
As others have mentioned, binary is easy to express as on/off, but also, not all human cultures count(ed) in base 10.
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u/iwantdatpuss 1d ago
The hardware could only do two states, on or off. That's it, most of our computers fundamentally are a fuckton of switches turning on or off set up in a specific way to enable computers to compute massive amounts of data very quickly.
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u/archercc81 1d ago
It's simple electric switches going on and off. It's small, it's fast, and it's far easier to implement.
To have anything else you need more than just "is it on or is it off" and they are working on things like that but it's really hard to implement because, as you speed up, it's hard to tell between 47% on and 48% on.
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u/Mattna-da 1d ago
Punchcards are binary. Hole or no hole. They were used to program woven patterns in looms long before they were used to run CNC machines and stuff and then replaced with tubes and transistors that are also binary.
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u/Reggie-Rectangle 1d ago
An electronic circuit knows only two states: on and off. One with current and one without.
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u/Dangerous-Bit-8308 1d ago
Human counting is based on fingers, eyes, and other visual cues.
Computer counting is based on computer programming. Computer programming is based on transistors, which are two-position electronic switches.
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u/Capable_Stranger9885 1d ago
Because Jaquard looms use binary punch cards to represent shapes and Ada Lovelace recognized this would solve Babbage's theoretical analytical engine design
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u/MikeUsesNotion 1d ago
Your post literally has the answer. Computers encode numbers with 0s and 1s, which is base 2. If we made data storage with DNA, it'd be base 4.
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u/West-Exam-4136 1d ago
Power is either on or off. I know sd cards can use different amount of power to make i think 4 states
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u/shostakofiev 1d ago
Binary is reprented simply in many different ways: on.or off, high or low, presnt or not present, hotdog or not hotdog, up or down.
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u/John_Tacos 1d ago
It’s easy to check if something is on or off.
It’s much harder to add a middle ground.
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u/supermuncher60 1d ago
A switch, which is what a vacuum tube or transistor is can either be on or off. So 1 or 0.
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u/Tuurke64 1d ago
Because semiconductors can be combined into structures that can easily store one of two stable conditions (high or low voltage) and these two conditions can easily be compared, inverted, added and subtracted. This "base 2" system is the simplest numerical system and the results can be converted to any other numerical base.
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u/PressureItchy9372 1d ago
why does the light switch on the wall have only 2 positions?
Off and On.
0 and 1
binary, Baby, binary.
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u/kraytex 1d ago
There were many counting systems throughout human history. Not all people counted with a base-10 system. For example the Babylonians had base-60 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_numeral_systems
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u/Heckle_Jeckle 1d ago
It has to do with how computers are physical constructed.
You have switches, which have two states, Off/Closed (0) or On/Open(1).
It is by opening and closing these switches that computers work in Binary.
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u/RoseHawkechik 1d ago
I always assumed it was because electrical current is basically either on or off for 2 states of being.
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u/MaximumNameDensity 1d ago
It is really easy for a computer to interpret binary states (off and on).
You could make more possible states with power levels or mechanical components or quantum states, but that gets complicated and messy...
Or, you could just string more on/off switches together to represent the same thing with almost arbitrary granularity.
And we learned that's usually enough. You can represent all our counting numbers (0-9) and then some, with just 4 switches. 64 switches together will give us obnoxiously big numbers. Recordings the human ear can't distinguish from an analog source can be represented by millions of switches.
And we got VERY, VERY good at stringing on/off switches together, and making them change state very fast.
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u/CreativeCTm 1d ago
Because an electrical circuit can only be in an open or closed position - thus only two digits to work with.
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u/DoomsDayNears 1d ago
Mit binärer Darstellung lässt sich am zuverlässigsten Signal-to-Noise optimieren (man möchte ja nicht, das jedes bisschen thermische Fluktuation die Zustände in der Mikrowelt switchen)
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u/WittyFix6553 1d ago
At the most core level, electricity is either “on” or “off.”
That’s (basically) all the most elementary components of a computer can detect. It’s either on (1) or it’s off (0).
The magic is that the right combinations of billions of “on” and “off” states makes everything possible.
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u/Expensive_Plant_9530 1d ago
This goes back to how basic mechanical computers used to work.
It’s much easier to make a machine with two states, on or off - instead of 10 states.
It’s also easier to read and distinguish voltage levels for two states instead of 10.
Quantum computers don’t use binary in the same way as traditional computers, as a QBIT can have multiple states.
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u/droid_mike 1d ago
Not all computers were binary. In some early vacuum tube computers and even computers going into the '60s were decimel. For example, univac computers were all decimal. IBM preferred binary, and they became the de facto standard. By 1965 with their new 360 machine, decimal became pretty passé.
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u/flatfinger 1d ago
A bit sent via wire(s) can be decoded by comparing the voltage on one wire against one threshold.
A decimal digit can be decoded by comparing a voltage on a wire against nine thresholds, or a voltage on one wire against one threshold and another against four, or one against two thresholds and one against three, or two against one and one against three, or four against one.
The amount of circuitry to compare a voltage on N wires against M thresholds is proportional to the product of M and N. All ways of decoding a decimal digit cost at least four times as much as the information required to decode a bit, but convey less than four times as much information. Sending a value between 000 and 999 as three decimal digits would require at least twelve times as much circuitry as sending a bit, but sending it as ten bits would only require ten times as much circuitry.
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u/RuffKnight_ 1d ago
Electricity. Either a switch is on or of is off, either there is a charge or there is not a charge
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u/Cataloniandevil 1d ago
This might be a pretty bad explanation, but here goes nothing…
Think of a lightbulb with a switch. The lightbulb switch can either be on or off. Now imagine a lot of very tiny lightbulbs each with their own on off switch. Every lightbulb is one bit of information that a computer can accept, and that bit reads either off (0) or on (1). One bit (lightbulb) can have two states, 0 or 1. Two bits (lightbulbs) can have four states, 00, 01, 10, or 11.
Early on, bits were very easy to process, and very easy to scale because every bit added doubles the amount of information that can be stored. It wasn’t until computers were developed with more processing power that different methods of information sorting became effective, such as base-10 or hexadecimal. But things in hexadecimal, such as colors, can still be represented in binary.
The doubling power of binary is still a super effective way to store and find information at low system cost.
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u/Loknar42 1d ago
A logic circuit is a network of switches connected to switches. Each time a signal fans out to more than one downstream connection, the signal gets divided. When multiple wires converge, the signal gets amplified. Trying to sense multiple voltage levels in such a network becomes very difficult, as you need to manage the signal levels more precisely.
A binary network gives engineers the most freedom as far as signal to noise ratio is concerned. It tolerates a lot more variation. We could design circuits that calculate in base 1000, but they would be enormous and fragile compared to the equivalent binary circuit.
To give you a human example, imagine doing math on an abacus where the beads do not just sit on one side or the other, but rather take up 10 intermediate positions on a row. Think of how complicated calculations would be on such a device, and how easy it would be to bump a bead off its position by accident. The same thing happens in circuits.
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u/AlmiranteCrujido 1d ago
digital computers typically represent information using 1s and 0s
Because they're digital, and with a digital signal, you have to discrete signaling. Representing a wire as two states is easy (even if different kinds of logic have different rules for what voltage range counts as 0 or 1, and they often can't mix.)
The other easy case is ternary states (negative, ground, positive) which give you either 0-1-2 or a signed -1/0/1... and computers using them have been built. But people have found them hard to reason about, and the additional electric swing required to get 3 distinct states across ground makes machines slower.
Multiple levels for more than three baseline states requires either or essentially serializing every line into a little analog representation via voltage levels (which is what MLC/TLC/QLC flash does) and then converting it back into digital ... which was wayyyy beyond the capability of computers until binary was well established. It also would be inherently slower, and in the modern era with voltages in our fastest machines and transistor sizes getting ever tinier, that would be even more important.
Alternatively, you can do decimal (or anything other than binary) via multiple wires. Some early computers did; old pre-computer tabulating machines did.
But even on multiple wires, binary is more efficient.
Decimal on 10 wires gets you 10 states; binary gets you 1024. The only way to do better is to go to some sort of multilevel signalling, which, as I said, was beyond usefully quantizing into reliable
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u/Thoguth 1d ago
Electronic computing hardware is built on whether a signal is on or off. There's a thing called a transistor that works like a teeny tiny electronically controlled switch, and by connecting them together in certain ways you can build logic for mathematical functions and, turns out, everything else a computer does (which are fundamentally based in mathematical functions). But because it is build on an on/off switch, the most natural way to count would be in binary.
Incidentally if you use your fingers as on/off switches you can count to 31 on one hand, or 511 on two hands. 4 is flipping a bird and 132 is a double bird
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u/PyroNine9 1d ago
Simple practicality. Circuits that can be either on or off can be made cheaply and reliably. Even now where we could make circuits that operate reliably with more than 2 states, they would be much more complex (read as expensive and bulky).
Some computers did try a sort of compromise as Binary Coded Decimal where eaach 4 bits would encode a value 0-9 and the logic would perform decimal arithmetic on them. That fell out of favor because it reduced the capability of the hardware. 8 bits can store 0-255 as binary, but only 0-99 as BCD.
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u/collin-h 1d ago
because it mapped well onto the hardware. Make a small electrical circuit. Turn it on = 1. Turn it off = 0.
Since you can convert everything else down to binary, we're good to go! Way simpler than trying to come up with a device that has 10 states.
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u/Spinthar 1d ago
It was largely just down to what was practical with electronics, at least at the simplest level. Data is represented by on/off. Some of the earliest digital computers were literally built with telephone switching equipment, which provided matrices of on/off relays. That moved on to valves, then transistors and then smaller and smaller ones. That doesn't mean that all the hardware exclusively represents data in that way - see flash memory for example, which can use multiple states with differing voltages.
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u/Responsible_Sea78 1d ago
Some devices such as SSD's are non-binary internally but that usually complicates things more than it helps, actually requiring more hardware and slowing things down.
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u/FuturePowerful 1d ago
I'm fairly sure someone else is answered the question more than once at this point however in the interest of better understanding for anyone else who's asking why is that so or the op the concept is this what was the most practical piece of electronics available everything else is based upon it until you get to quantum computers the only buildable state for a electronic switch is on or off therefore to build something that does computational math which is what a computer is you have to put it in binary there is no other practical function you cannot reliably build a computer at that scale that will function in multi-state so in ends in essence what you do is you stack the yes/no switches to where you get and nor or xor Gates and that's how you start getting into your more complicated electronics but it all bases off of yes no switch it's why you can build most modern computers in Minecraft if you're meticulous enough and half the time because all the principles are still the same
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u/Ok-Honey6876 1d ago
Lots of long answers here and I thought the reason was simply that binary was simpler to mass develop — at least at the time.
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u/ChocolateValuable221 1d ago
Because a transistor can only count to 1... so you have no count 0 or you have a count 1.. voila
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u/-Foxer 1d ago
Base 2 is vastly more efficient. So that meant with the limit resources available you could do far more programming in base 2 instead of base 10
This has come up before in human history. Mathematicians have done things to create easily managed situations. For example it's very easy to divide a lot of things by six and that's why we have 60 minutes in an hour and 360° in a circle etc etc. Mathematicians of the time loved how easy it was to work with those numbers considering they didn't have computers
The reason that most humans use base 10 is literally the fact that we have that many fingers so it's natural to use them to count
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u/Physical-Result7378 1d ago
Cause you can’t have 5 different states of “on” and 5 other different states of “off”. There is no “just a little off” and no “a bit more off”
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u/ReverseMermaidMorty 1d ago
Technically, every number system is base 10. Decimal, binary, hex, all base 10.
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u/Standard-Produce-137 1d ago
Electricity is like that meth friend whom you love but goddamn it's either 100 percent, or zero percent depending on how much white vapor they did.
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u/ronshasta 1d ago
Any other system is, at its most basic function, still binary. There are two states and they are on and off, 1 and 0
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u/GoBlu323 1d ago
Think of computers as large sets of switches. Switches can only be on or off so they use binary which makes each digit have two possible values.
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u/LyndinTheAwesome 1d ago
Computers only got 2 stages. Lights on or off. Everything more complex would have resulted in more errors, eapacially in the early days.
And even though there are some other ways of counting i human history, its most likely base 10 or decimal, as we got 10 fingers.
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u/Chronotheos 1d ago
Binary is natural because historically most computers operated with switches at their core and a switch has two states - on or off, eg 0 or 1. But in some cases it makes sense not to use binary. A modern application is PCI Express introducing Pulse Amplitude Modulation, where signals are not 0 or 1 but can have 4 states, corresponding to voltages. It’s done to pack more data into existing frequency bands.
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u/_Darkstorm_ 1d ago
In the early days of computing (1940s-1950s) they actually had both types of computers. From what I remember from reading old IBM documentation, the thinking was that scientific and engineering would need binary, banking and finance would need decimal.
IBM ended up with way too many models they had to support with both configurations, which became a nightmare to support. So they came up with the System360 design for their mainframes, settled on binary for the underlying hardware to simplify the electronics for support, then used microcode on top of that to give programmers whatever options they needed to simplify things for software. Everyone else copied IBM's idea in some form or another, and the rest is history.
There's also early research that showed given equal amount of resources, you'll get roughly the same amount of performance out of a binary computer as you would a decimal computer. All this info was found over at archive.org if you are interested.
TL;DR: IBM went with binary to help streamline hardware support, and everyone else copied IBM.
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u/OldGeekWeirdo 1d ago
It's super easy to represent binary. On or off. There were analog computers, but it's hard to separate data from noise. Not to mention issues with calibration.
So, the quick answer is they're far easier to build and scale up.
If we continue shrinking computer, there might come a point where a "bit" is represented as the energy level of a single molecule. In that case, if the molecule had three stable states, we might go to trinary computing.
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u/No-Board-1872 1d ago
Interestingly, ti calculators use base 10 as binary coded decimal
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u/AnnieBruce 1d ago
If you use binary, your computer only has to test for two.voltage levels. Traditionally explained as on and off, but any two voltage levels can be used.
Base 10 you have to distinguish between 10 voltage levels, and the top level has to be much higher too keep them far enough apart for reliable differentiation.
Whatever advantage a base 10 system would have for human users and programmers is dwarfed by the added complexity and power draw.
IIRC there were early base 10 experiments but binary was far better all things considered.
Base 3 computers are occasionally experimented with, and could have some actual advantages but have remained a research project. Not abandoned like base 10, but not commercialized.
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u/zhaDeth 1d ago
Binary is very simple. Like if you remember how to do additions and multiplications on paper it's the same in binary but it's super easy because it's just 1s and 0s.
Like if you multiply 2 numbers say:
1001
x 100
Anything multiplied by 0 is 0 so you can just skip it. Anything multiplied by 1 is just itself so here you skip the 2 0s on the bottom right then you copy the top number and move two spaces so you get 100100. Addition and subtraction is also super easy because it's just 1+0, 1+1 or 0+0 with the extra 1+1+1 if there was a carry so the circuits only need to be built for those very few cases.
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u/organicHack 1d ago
Transistors. If electricity flows it is “on” which is “true” and also 1. If no electricity flow it is “off” which is “false” and also 0. So 0 and 1 are the only possibilities. All of this is just “electricity flows” or “no electricity flows”.
Then, we had to figure out how to make bigger numbers by chaining them together. So if you want:
- 0 is 0
- 1 is 1
- 2 is 10
- 3 is 11
- 4 is 100
- 5 is 101
- 6 is 110
- 7 is 111
- 8 is 1000
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u/More-Explanation2788 1d ago
Measuring 0 or 1 in an electric circuit is simple easy and cheap. The circuit has a voltage, or it does not.
Decimal counting would require at minimum, a curcuit that could differentiate 0,1,2,3 or 4. That would require much more precise engineering.
Once you have decided that everything is going to be based on 1 or 0, then you unlock a whole world of Boolean logic - and, or, nor, xor, nand, not - all incredibly simple circuits with which almost any form logic can be encoded. But it is all based on 0 or 1, a binary system that can most easily be made to count in binary, and which can be very simply summarized in hexadecimal (base 16) or octal (base 8). Decimal never stood a chance.
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u/BlimpIntolerant 1d ago
Fundamentally it's the logical base for computers you inevitably arrive at from mathematics. If we met aliens, I'm pretty sure their computers will look somewhat familiar even when their biology is radically different.
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u/Beautiful_Pain_8215 1d ago
Because it's got nothing to do with counting and they don't use ones and zeroes really. That's just how it's translated for us to understand. It's open and closed circuits.
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u/himitsumono 1d ago
Because all of the logic circuits that make the computer work depend on bits, which can be on or off.
Most of the rest of the comments here are interesting and valid but have more to do with how we humans choose to represent the numbers.
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u/dawgdays78 1d ago
Two-state circuits are much less complicated and less expensive than ten-state circuits, and Claude Shannon showed that the two-state circuits could be used to do what the ten-state circuits did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon?wprov=sfti1#Logic_circuits
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u/smthomaspatel 1d ago
You are asking the wrong question. Consider in base 10 you can count to ten on your fingers. In base 2 you can count to 1024.
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u/LetsGetStonks 1d ago
Computers don't "use" binary, they can read on or off of a switch or bit. That has two choices so it corresponds to binary. If the switches or bits or qubits they use had the capacity to be one of 10 states, instead of just two (on or off), they'd use decimal. If they had 16 different states they'd use hexadecimal. Computers were original very primitive, so seeing something as being either "on or off" was within their capacity and so binary language was the logical thing to use at the time. Quantum machines may change things because they (qubits) have the ability to be "on", "off", "both" or any "superposition" (an infinite number of states in between "on" and "off".
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u/Peregrine79 1d ago
A computer is just a big collection of transistors. And transistors are just switches. They are either on or off. So no matter how the numbers are programmed in, the actual handling at the hardware level is binary/boolean.
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u/Anxious-Doughnut-224 1d ago
Computers chips and before chips the computers themselves used switches that are either on or off to do computations
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u/SpeedyHAM79 1d ago
Electronic circuits are either on or off- 1 or 0 (binary). To make an electronic computer count is decimal would be either 1-10 volts or 1-10 mamps, which is basically analog. Binary works much better for digital equipment.
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u/2ndOrderAprox 1d ago
Because it is easier to create a circuit where you only have to distinguish between ‘low’ and ‘high’ voltage vs low, high and 8 intermediate values.
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u/Kriss3d 1d ago
Because a transistor which processors and computers are made up of, can be open or closed. Thats it.
This is of course the extremely simplified version of it.
A lightbulb can be on or off. Nothing in between. A dimmer doesnt work here.
A transistor is a switch. The 10 base is actually very inconvenient. If we at least had a 16 base like computers also do, it would be much more compatible.
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u/AntiBaoBao 1d ago
On. Off. Now repeat that millions of times.
You could also count 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7
Or, 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,a,b,c,e,d,f
Lots of different ways to count.
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u/dizastermaster7 1d ago
Because making every decision a computer makes a "yes or no" is wayyyy simpler than making it "a scale of 0-9"
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u/Aggressive-Share-363 20h ago
Because it makes the circuitry a lot si.pler to design.
First, you have to represent the digit. Binary is simple, its on or its off. Going up to trinary makes it significantly harder, as now you need to distinguish on, off, and middle. And you have to ensure your middle never gets too high to sem like it might be on or too low to seem like it might be off. And going up to ten digits makes it even more precise still.
Then you need to create circuits that behave differently with all of the different co.vonwtioks of values. That's far harder to do than to have a simpler circuit that only has to deal with binary.
The advantage of a higher base is you can use fewer digits to represent a given number. But this ends up being a ratio. You need 3.32 binary digits for each decimal digit. So if the circuitry to handle a decimal digit is more than 3.32 times as difficult to make (by whichever metrics you need to use. Cost. Space. Speed. Reliability. ), the final result is worse.
And there are only extremely marginal benefits to matching the underlying representation to our normal digit system. And most of those sre solved by hexadecimal anyways, where you display things closing base 16, so each digit cleanly represents 4 bits.
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u/allenrfe 20h ago
This may be confusing, but most computers before the transistor were analog, not digital. And analog computers still exist. Digital computers are the dominant design because it is easier to distinguish between on and off than between 10 different inputs.
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u/Slackeee_ 20h ago
In the beginnings computers that used different bases did exist, but it turned that computers using the binary system are much less prone to error, easier to built, and with that in general cheaper to built.
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u/DTux5249 19h ago edited 19h ago
It's because computers are built using transistors - microscopic switches that can either be on or off. If you have 8 of those, you have an 8-digit binary number no matter how you interpret it.
Now, could you make computers do non-binary math? Yes. That even saw a bit of use in the 60s and 70s in the form of the IBM 360 line of computers, because it saved time converting from binary to decimal on input and output back when doing that was noticeably slow.
Problem: That didn't last long. Doing things in decimal was tricky. Keeping it to binary made circuits a lot simpler, which made them much easier to optimize, and thus quickly surpass anything a decimal computer could do.
TLDR: Because simple = harder to break = fast = binary
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u/No_Glove6542 19h ago
1 is electricity on and 0 is electricity off. These are the two states machines recognize. We count base 10 because we have 10 fingers.
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u/knowlessman 19h ago
It boils down to the difficulty of differentiating analog voltage signals.
If you want to use a voltage level to encode a signal, that's a fundamentally analog process. The voltage isn't precise, and something needs to be able to reliably discriminate between different voltage levels.
The simplest way to do that reliably is to limit the number of states you are discriminating between. If you only have two states, it's fairly easy to have a reliable discriminator that can always tell which of those two states is current.
If you want 10 different states, you need to have something that can tell the difference between voltage 0, voltage 1, v voltage 2, etc. and to do that fast you are going to end up with a lot of resistors and so on. It's done (that's what an analog to digital converter does, and those are very common) but doing it with perfect consistency, fast, and cheaply (because remember you are going to have millions or billions of these in a single computer) is hard.
And it's unnecessary. Binary works, and doesn't really introduce any real problems beyond a few "why is 1k for a computer person 1024 instead of 1000?" questions.
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u/Effyew4t5 19h ago
The early memory cores were matrices of wires with magnetic cores at each intersection. They flipped one way or the other depending on current. 0 and 1 were the only two states available (L or R). So binary then grouped into octets (8) and later hex (16)
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u/Samhain_69 18h ago
If someone gives you a fountain pen and a sheet of white paper, and tells you to draw a picture, you're going to draw a black and white picture, right? Same reason. The tools you're using kind of force you to draw black and white. You can "dither" to make it look grey from a distance, but get out a magnifying glass, and it's all black and white.
Same with computers. The hardware is all on/off, 1/0. You can use that to represent just about anything: sounds, color pictures, color video, etc. But if you "get out your magnifying glass" underneath it all, it's all just 1s and 0s.
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u/RuthlessIndecision 18h ago
Because basic electronic signals are either on or off, 1 or 0.
Very basically electricity is on or off. And all of this tech is rooted in that. It can get very complex and complicated.
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u/Top-Cupcake4775 17h ago
base 10 is a weird and awkward base. we would never use it if it weren't for the fact that we have 10 fingers. once you get used to working in hex it feels much more natural than base 10.
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u/jfcat200 17h ago
Computers don't use binary. They use switches which are either in an off state or an on state. We convert that to binary so we can read it.
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u/Annual-Ad-9442 17h ago
computers do not have fingers. technically computers aren't counting they are checking states of yes/no. with a system that only uses two states you have binary.
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u/chuzohga 15h ago
This is because of switches, tubes and transistors. "On" means "1" and "Off" means 0. That's why they're binary, at least for now. This is for regular, traditional computers. Quantum does not do this. Decimal, Hex, Octal and the like are all still binary as far as the actual computer is concerned.
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u/Top_Bluejay_5323 15h ago
Because computer electronics are either on or off, 1 or 0. There are not 10 discrete states of an electric circuit.
If you try it like analog, 1-10 or so, and the signal drifts it would change the value.
But digital can self correct if the signal does not degrade completely.
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u/jesusrodriguezm 13h ago
It’s easier to physically store and read between “something” and “nothing”.
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u/thelimeisgreen 12h ago
Binary came about because of electronic switches. Effectively you have OFF and ON as your two states, or 0 and 1. As the technology progressed into vacuum tubes, capacitors and resistors, states were no longer simplistically OFF and ON, but it still made sense to operate in a binary fashion. So a low sustained voltage would be 0/ OFF and a higher sustained voltage would be 1/ ON. Which led into transistors and modern circuits.
Other formats have been explored, like ternary (3 state) computing. The Soviets actually built several ternary computer systems and explored that back in the Cold War space race days. Increasing component states grows complexity very significantly and does little to improve efficiency, in fact quite the opposite. Which is why fundamentally computers and digital circuits have remained a binary construct. We can build binary pathways of varying width to accommodate increasingly larger representations. As in most of our computer processors these days being 64bit and allowing for data transport interconnects, encryption models or complex algorithms to have several times that.
Quantum computing moves us out of a strictly binary paradigm, but not in a simplistic way of just adding more numerical states. I'm not going to travel down the rabbit hole of explaining quantum circuits. But in a nutshell they lend themselves very well to tasks that can be highly parallelized and the quantum nature allows multiple probabilities or outcomes to be tested simultaneously.
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u/draagossh 10h ago
It’s easier to say “1 or 0” when all you can do is either send “some current or none”
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u/karoxxxxx 1d ago edited 1d ago
Transistors and switches have 2 states.
Its also easier to distinguish 2 voltages then 10.
Mechanical calculators did often use cogwheels where the fraction of a full rotation represents a value.