Why are NAND gates used to make AND gates in computers?
In order to get non-inverting operation for logic (i.e., AND or OR vs. NAND or NOR), you need to operate the transistors in common-drain mode, also known as "source follower" mode.

Among the problems with this mode for logic:


There is no voltage gain. After more than a few stages, the signal is down to nothing.
There is a significant offset (called the threshold voltage) between inputs and outputs. A high-level output will be lower than the corresponding high-level input.


Together, these issues mean that you cannot connect the output of this gate to the inputs of another copy of itself. This makes it rather useless for building more complex circuits.

This is why all successful logic families1 are built using transistors in common-source (or common-emitter) mode, which has significant voltage gain and no cumulative offsets between inputs and outputs &mdash; but the output is inverted with respect to the input. Therefore, the basic functions include an inversion: either NAND or NOR.

As a bonus, NAND and NOR gates are "functionally complete", which means that you can build any logic function at all (including storage elements such as latches and flip-flops) from all NAND gates or all NOR gates.



1 To be specific, logic families that use voltages as logic states. This includes RTL, DTL, TTL, PMOS, NMOS and CMOS. Current-mode logic families such as ECL do indeed use a combination of emitter followers and common-base transistors to achieve the same ends while avoiding saturation (for speed).