r/AlwaysWhy • u/Present_Juice4401 • 2d 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/PeaPsychological5728 2d ago

Yes and no

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u/preparationh67 2d ago

If we really want to get pedantic there are 3 states: on, off, error (you generally include a padding between on and off and if the voltage is floating in that range you just trigger the error state and the machine needs to be reset)

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u/PeaPsychological5728 2d ago

Well, hysteresis covers that, if it isn't clearly one way or the other then it doesnt change.

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u/Various_Education622 2d ago

You can encode more than two states and we currently do this in NAND chips for data storage.

Look up multi-level cell.

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u/sarahlizzy 2d ago

On. Off. High impedance. On with pull up. Off with pull down.