Interesting Article on Chinese Typewriter

[Polecat]

Might be old news, but I found this article on a Chinese typewriter interesting:

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-uncanny-keyboard?

[del20nd]

This subject is definitely interesting. Also interesting is how IBM was trying to crack the same nut at about the same time:

From Wikipedia:

On June 28, 1944, Kao Chung-Chin, an inventor at IBM, filed for a patent with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and on December 17, 1946 was issued patent number 2412777A for his invention.[9] Chung-Chin's typewriter employed 36 keys, divided across four banks. The first bank had six keys numbered 0 through 5, and the three other banks each had 10 keys numbered 0 through 9. In order to type a character, the operator was required to simultaneously select one key from each of the four banks. Each of those four-digit combinations corresponded to one of 5,400 Chinese characters, or other symbols such as punctuation marks, which were etched onto the surface of a revolving drum inside the typewriter. The drum had a diameter of 7 inches, a length of 11 inches, and made a complete revolution once per second, allowing for the operator to achieve a maximum typing speed of 45 words per minute.

[Muirium]

The book that article's excerpted from is Tom Mullaney's:



The subject rings a bell: sure enough, I listened to an interview with him a few years ago on Stuff to Blow Your Mind. He takes them through the evolution of Chinese language text input, which soon left early experimental keyboards like the above and headed westwards to variants of the ubiquitous American and (if I remember) Russian keyboards. The bit that stays in my memory is how the glyphs which spell Mao's name had to be upgraded from the rare row to the principal row, for purely political expedience.