This is a theory based off what I have learned. Must have an understanding of binary to continue. In our hard drives we use on and off to represent ones and zeros that make up all our data. Many things that are stored on there are ASCII letters and numbers, MP3s and JPEGs. ASCII uses 8 bits, MP3s use 128 bits and JPEGs use 24 bits. (Correct me if I'm wrong here). Each format is divisible by four. When we want to represent the letter "a" in binary we use "01100001", because we are limited to two options 1 and 0. Since a lot of our data formats are more or equal to 4 bits most times (right?) we can find other ways to represent data than just ones and zeros. Instead of 1 and 0, how about 0-7? Confused yet? Lemme explain. Instead of using binary, we could use quartets. So instead of using "0110 0001" to represent "a" we could use "6 1". 0110 = 6 and 0001 = 1. Now how would 0-7 be represented on a physical data storage device? Not with on and off but with 8 different possible states. 8 states for each number 0-7. Those 8 states could be represented by 8 different pit depths for optical drives or 8 different magnetic states for HDs. Having 1 quartet state instead 4 binary states could increase storage capacity quite a bit. I'm not sure how CPUs could use this kind of addressing. Maybe using different levels of electrical power for those 8 states. It's all kind of hurting my head right now. Does this make sense? Could this really be used? Or is it more complicated than generalizing 4 bits into one quartet? Thoughts?