Why was unary, radix 1, not used as the basis for 12480?
Unary is far too simple for use in much of anything. It is not a positional system, so the quantity expresses the number. Tally marks are the closest to unary, but even they need a separator to keep the unary numbers away from the next set (binary). Computers cannot use unary productively because they could never get any different values from it. The processor clock would need to change in order to find a different unary value, but the clock would need to use a binary or higher radix source to know when it should change.
