The forgotten history of Chinese keyboards

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  • Random Encounter
    Administrator
    • Jan 2024
    • 495

    The forgotten history of Chinese keyboards

    Before QWERTY, engineers had a wealth of ingenious and strange designs for inputting Chinese characters. This adapted book excerpt takes us back to the 1960s and 70s and looks at the efforts to connect China to the digital world at the time.


    Some of the solutions offered to this problem were hilarious. I'm kind of fond of the one that required you flipping through conductive pages to find your character. And yet in the end, they made it work with a standard QWERTY design.
  • Skunkworks
    Valiant
    • Feb 2024
    • 150

    #2
    Radiolab did a great podcast on the fundamental underlying issue with the language that spawned all these strange peripherals, and the ultimate solution (Wubi, I believe). https://radiolab.org/podcast/wubi-effect

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    • Random Encounter
      Administrator
      • Jan 2024
      • 495

      #3
      I can't recommend Radiolab enough, it's a good show.

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