Forgotten technology

What Chinese people typed on before the QWERTY keyboard

The Information Processing Technology Research Office for Chinese Characters at Peking University investigated the "large keyboard" approach, in which 2000 or more frequently used characters were assigned to a fairly large desktop-sized interface. This was not successful.

(Bild: Public Domain)

If you only know 26 letters, punctuation marks and ten Arabic numerals, you can easily "fill" a computer keyboard with them. But what do people whose language is not so simple, such as the Chinese with their thousands of characters, actually do? Slightly different keyboards ...

It all began with a lecture by historian Arnold J. Toynbee at Washington and Lee University in Virginia in the 1960s: In the audience of the lecture on a "changing world in the light of history" sat a young Chinese-speaking cadet from Taiwan, Chan-hui Yeh. When Toynbee discussed the rise of great civilizations using China as an example and brought China's complicated script into play as an identity-forming element, Yeh had a revelation: digitization could destroy China forever if no way was found to interact with the emerging new technology of computers in Chinese. Yeh couldn't get the problem out of his head - and years later he founded the first successful Chinese computer company, Ideographix. This was the start of an amazing journey on which China's IT world tried to digitally reclaim its language with monstrous forgotten input devices - only to end up back with the "Western keyboard" ...