Not especially knowledgeable, but one factor in the relative lack of interest in other gates might be that NAND and NOR are the only two universal gates which t

Not especially knowledgeable, but one factor in the relative lack of interest in other gates might be that NAND and NOR are the only two universal gates which treat their inputs equally. The others ("A and not B", "B and not A", "A or not B", "B or not A") behave differently if you swap A and B, whereas NAND and NOR are symmetrical under that operation. Edit to add: Incidentally, I do remember reading one logic text where boolean algebra was defined in terms of, and built up entirely from, the "B or Not A" gate, which the text called "if" or "->" It is only false when A is true and B is false, which matches what logicians expect from a conditional statement, for example: "if it's raining then it's cloudy" is only contradicted by the combination of raining but not cloudy. If it's not raining, then the statement is not falsified whether there's clouds or not.