I used to think, how the history of computing and Internet would look like, if computers converged on 3-base system, with trits instead of bits, and trytes instead of bytes.

If one tryte was 9 trites, it would have 3^3=19693 values. All the European characters and a lot of others can be encoded with this. There would be no need to invent char/int integer types in C (with the added mess of short, short short, long, and long long) int would be enough at the time. Maybe at the point when it would become necessary to add different integer types, C would choose a saner approach of stdint.h, and there would be no legacy code playing with legacy integer types?

And 27 trites (or 3 trytes) is around 2^42.8 values, like 42 bits. It would be enough even now, I think.

binary is far easier to do in electronics (on or off)