I realise (/think?) that CPUs essentially treat two different voltages as a 1 or 0, but what stops us from using 3 or more different voltages? Wouldn’t that exponentially increase the CPU’s throughput by allowing for decisions with greater than two outcomes to be calculated in one cycle? This would presumably mean that a LOT of stuff written for base 2 would need to be updated to base 3 (in this example), but I can’t imagine that’s the only reason we haven’t done this.
I feel like I’ve explained that poorly, but hopefully you get the gist.
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When you get into the history of computing, you learn that almost everything about computing is the way it is because:
a) They first people to enter that particular area of computing decided to make it that way
B) There was no compelling reason to change and inertia took over
Look at your keyboard. You know why they keys are in the order they are? Because mechanical typewriter had to move the most common letters farther apart so the arms wouldn’t jam up by typists going to fast, so they were deliberately built to have the keys in an inefficient placement.
Why are computer keyboards, which don’t have this issue, have the same layout? Because early IT researchers decided to copy physical keyboards, and since then inertia has carried it along, despite a solid effort from Dvorack
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