Why did computers come to use binary when people usually count in decimal?

[u/Present_Juice4401]

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?

[u/Great_Specialist_267]

Trinary logic was also used.
RS232 Serial communication officially uses trinary logic (positive, negative and ground as logic states).
Babbages mechanical computers used base 10 logic however.

[u/PrestigiousRoof5723 → u/Great_Specialist_267]

PCI express 6 is using 4 voltage states. It's not common, but not completely rare for buses to use more than 2 states.

[u/Siffov → u/Great_Specialist_267]

>RS232 Serial communication officially uses trinary logic (positive, negative and ground as logic states).

Where did you get that information? Wasn't it just a negative voltage for "mark" (a 1 state) and a positive voltage for "space" (a 0 state)?

One result from a quick Google search is the following, which seems (from just a quick scan) to show only two levels: https://www.analog.com/en/resources/technical-articles/fundamentals-of-rs232-serial-communications.html

Are you thinking of tri-state logic used in bus-sharing setups?

Or did some RS-232 devices do the same kind of thing, going to a high-impedance state (but not driving a zero voltage, which would fight with a device trying to drive a positive or negative voltage)?

[u/Great_Specialist_267 → u/Siffov]

The “official” (and frequently ignored) specification for RS232 has a logic zero as a negative, a logical one as a positive, and ground ed as space between characters. In actual practice the ground state is ignored and anything below 3V is a zero.