Could our computers handle it? Makes me remember the count by 5 system. In this case, the 4 sticks are connected into a W. And the tick across the 4 sticks becomes a bar on top. The bar on top can count from 1-4. And then it goes to the next digit. So instead of base 16, we have a base 20.
Much like mayan, a base 20 system, very nice for addition subtraction, need to be a bit cleverer for multiplication. I made a little javascript module to convert arab to mayan numerals and render an SVG to go with them. Here's a fun demo
It's been a very long time since computers were anything other than binary, and unless quantum computing takes a, haha, quantum leap forward it will be a very long time yet until they're doing anything else.
But they can handle converting to and from this numeral system for the few humans who find it more natural to work with just fine.
Yes, computers can handle base 20. The IBM 1401 business computer (1959) could optionally support pounds/shillings/pence in hardware, where there were 20 shillings in a pound and 12 pence in a shilling. (Britain switched to decimal currency in 1971 for reasons that should be clear.) It could add, subtract, multiply, divide, and format pounds/shillings/pence as well as its normal base-10 arithmetic. So it was doing base-12 and base-20 arithmetic.
I should point out that this was implemented in hardware with transistors (lots of germanium transistors), not microcode or software. In other words, the three fundamental hardware datatypes of the IBM 1401 were arbitrary-length decimal numbers, arbitrary-length strings, and pounds/shillings/pence. Of course there were two conflicting standards on how to represent pounds/shillings/pence, so there was a knob on the computer's front panel to select the standard.
(This isn't directly related to the Inuit base-20, but I'm sure IBM would have supported Inuit base-20 if customers would pay for it.)
