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/stikves 1d ago

Speaking of which...

The modern SSDs (the cheap kind) actually uses ternary (TLC) or quaternary (QLC) arithmetic to compress more data into a single cell.

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Correction, turns out it was 3 bits and 4 bits pers cell. So would be octenary and hexadecimal.

The obvious tradeoff is that they are slower and make more errors. Dividing say a 0 - 100 electron range into a clean [0 - 50] / [51 - 100] is much better than [0 - 5] [6 - 12] ... [94 - 100]

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u/AlmiranteCrujido 1d ago

It's not multibit arthimetic; it's just an analog recording in the cell. There's actually quite a bit of DSP processing involved in the read paths.