why does computers language only have 0 &1?

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why does computers language only have 0 &1?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

It doesn’t need to. In the early days of experimentation with electronic computers there were computers built that didn’t use binary: there were analog computers, there were computers that used base 10 (like us) and there were at least proposals for ternary computers, although I don’t think any actually got built.

But in the end binary won out for two related reasons: simplicity and cost. The engineers found it was much simpler to reason about, and therefore predict, the behaviour of binary systems, and the circuitry to build them was simple and easy to mass produce (essentially you just need a device that can switch things on and off electronically, i.e. a valve or (later) a transistor).

The simplicity meant that binary computers were far less prone to going wrong, and far cheaper to produce.

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