Whenever I see or think about this word "binary" I see images of computers flashing in my head. It happens to you too, isn't it? Yes, that happens to a lot of people because many of us have seen or heard this word while explaining what really a computer is or how a computer works.
Binary is a base-2 number system. There are other number systems with their own base number also. For example, the one we use for all our daily calculations, decimal with a base-10 and also octal with a base-8 and hexadecimal with a base-16. This base number is just only the number of digits that are present in a number system. For example, binary has only two digits (0, 1) and decimal has 10 digits (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9). Well, Enough with a math class! Let's get to the point!
So, why do we use binary and not the other number system in a digital computer? The answer is "for the nature of electricity". Everything in your computing device is nothing but millions and billions of electrical signals. As our digital computer is an electronic device and runs on electricity it must have to be designed in respect of the flow of electricity. You see it's really to hard to measure the amount of voltages pass through a circuit and translate it as decimal numbers. For example, +5 volts are just only a measurement but we simply can't say it's a decimal number 5. But if we take just only the on (+5 volts) and off (0 volts) states of electricity we can easily represent the binary and actually it is binary! [ ON = 1, OFF = 0 ]
There are various advantages of a binary computer. Mostly, binary computers are easier to program and they are easier to implement. Beside these, there are tons of reasons why we use binary to design our computer circuitry. The world's first binary computer was a motor-driven mechanical computer called Z1 which was build by Konrad Zuse from 1936 to 1937. and now we are here with full of 0's and 1's floating around us!