"...you could have a transistor which has three states instead of two (0, 1, and 2!)"
yeah, sure. that would work REAL well with the logic computers are based on. programmers would have to deal with booleans with values like true (1), false (0), and whatever (2). Think of how the numbering systems of computers would change... there could be 6561 (3^8) in 8 bits instead of 256 (2^8). hey... then we wouldn't need two whole bytes for all those chineese characters! It would take a while to change the 1,000,000,000 decibytes (or however much it is) of data there is stored on computers from binary to trinary, and processors would have a hard time with the logical operaters (and, or, xor, not, etc.) What's 2102012^12012001 in base 3? computers would have to convert from trinary, to binary, then to trinary (to be transferred) and then finally to decimal, instead of binary to decimal.
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"...you could have a transistor which has three states instead of two (0, 1, and 2!)"
yeah, sure. that would work REAL well with the logic computers are based on. programmers would have to deal with booleans with values like true (1), false (0), and whatever (2). Think of how the numbering systems of computers would change... there could be 6561 (3^8) in 8 bits instead of 256 (2^8). hey... then we wouldn't need two whole bytes for all those chineese characters! It would take a while to change the 1,000,000,000 decibytes (or however much it is) of data there is stored on computers from binary to trinary, and processors would have a hard time with the logical operaters (and, or, xor, not, etc.) What's 2102012^12012001 in base 3? computers would have to convert from trinary, to binary, then to trinary (to be transferred) and then finally to decimal, instead of binary to decimal.