"Are there really little "things" holding 0s and 1s in DRAM for example?"
At the moment, close enough to yes to make no difference. There's various ways of trying to score internet pedant points by fiddling around the very edges of that statement, but they're not relevant to a casual question. Yes, there is somewhere where you can find a physical thing that we might call a "one" and a "zero", even if it's not quite the same exact 1 or 0 you might get in your CPU due to parity or forward error correction or whatever other crazy thing you may have.
I mention those fiddly details to get them out of the way so I can bring up the bare handful of devices that actually functioned on true, no-kidding ternary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_computer Per Knuth's note in that article, as we continue to optimize the heck out of our silicon and as we start running out of ability to simply shrink, it's not inconceivable that ternary computing could make a comeback in the future. It is often casually assumed in current sci-fi and such that binary is the true "final" base of the future, but ternary is not out of the running.
This would have next to no impact on anything else, though... in fact the first ternary computers would certainly simply run current programs, possibly recompiled and certainly at an efficiency penalty, but with no other end-user-visible effect.
(And let me warn you away from various speculations that ternary computers could somehow compute something binary computers can't. Turing Completeness, along with frankly obvious common (programmer) sense, precludes that. We already never truly work with bits... if we want bits we actually have to go out of our way to extract them from things at least the size of bytes, if not larger. Arguably modern computers are already in many ways Base256, as it is effectively impossible to manipulate anything smaller than an octet, which also obviously encompasses anything Base3 can do.)
At the moment, close enough to yes to make no difference. There's various ways of trying to score internet pedant points by fiddling around the very edges of that statement, but they're not relevant to a casual question. Yes, there is somewhere where you can find a physical thing that we might call a "one" and a "zero", even if it's not quite the same exact 1 or 0 you might get in your CPU due to parity or forward error correction or whatever other crazy thing you may have.
I mention those fiddly details to get them out of the way so I can bring up the bare handful of devices that actually functioned on true, no-kidding ternary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_computer Per Knuth's note in that article, as we continue to optimize the heck out of our silicon and as we start running out of ability to simply shrink, it's not inconceivable that ternary computing could make a comeback in the future. It is often casually assumed in current sci-fi and such that binary is the true "final" base of the future, but ternary is not out of the running.
On that note, see also: http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/issue.aspx?id=3268&y...
This would have next to no impact on anything else, though... in fact the first ternary computers would certainly simply run current programs, possibly recompiled and certainly at an efficiency penalty, but with no other end-user-visible effect.
(And let me warn you away from various speculations that ternary computers could somehow compute something binary computers can't. Turing Completeness, along with frankly obvious common (programmer) sense, precludes that. We already never truly work with bits... if we want bits we actually have to go out of our way to extract them from things at least the size of bytes, if not larger. Arguably modern computers are already in many ways Base256, as it is effectively impossible to manipulate anything smaller than an octet, which also obviously encompasses anything Base3 can do.)