If you know just 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, for example the Chinese with their thousands of characters, do? Slightly different keyboards…
It all started 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” was a young Chinese-speaking cadet Taiwan, Chan-hui Yeh. As Toynbee discussed the rise of great civilizations that used China as an example and brought into play China’s complicated script as an element of identity, Yeh had an epiphany: digitalization could forever destroy China as a way to speak Chinese with the emerging new technology of computer turned out not to interact. Yeh couldn’t get the problem out of his mind – and years later he founded the first successful Chinese computer company, Ideographix. The beginning of an astonishing journey in which the Chinese IT world tried to digitally reclaim its language with monstrously forgotten input devices – only to end up back with the ‘Western keyboard’…
Source: Krone
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