South SFV Today

Thomas Mullaney's latest book, "The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age" (MIT Press, 2024), delves into the intricate history of integrating the Chinese writing system with modern digital technology. The Stanford professor and co-director of SILICON explores how over 80,000 characters were made accessible through compact alphabetic keyboards.

The narrative begins in 1959 when an MIT engineer introduced a prototype for a Chinese-optimized computer called the Sinotype. This development coincided with Mao Zedong's proclamation that China needed to adopt the Latin alphabet to modernize fully. Over the next three decades, engineers from China, Taiwan, Japan, and the United States developed various methods to reconcile China's written tradition with keyboard computing.

"This is not a story of Chinese engineers solving a Chinese linguistic puzzle," Mullaney stated. "Rather, it’s a story of engineers all over the world who became transfixed, even haunted, by a wickedly hard problem."

Mullaney explains that while Chinese characters appear similar on paper and screens, the underlying technology differs significantly. The engineers' innovations allowed a fifth of humanity to participate fully in the digital age and transformed technology along the way.

Mullaney's previous work, "The Chinese Typewriter" (MIT Press, 2018), tackled earlier challenges in adapting typewriters for thousands of characters. These challenges motivated further innovations in electric typewriters and early computers. Samuel Caldwell's 1959 Sinotype machine required users to key in brushstrokes but eventually led to more efficient methods using keystrokes as directory addresses for character retrieval.

Bitmaps play a crucial role in rendering characters on screens by representing pixel values. Hypographic writing emerged as humans began signaling devices to retrieve characters from memory rather than creating them manually. This development paved the way for auto-complete features and predictive text technologies.

Despite these advancements, significant hurdles remained before Chinese speakers could fully embrace digital technology. For instance, even two decades after Caldwell’s Sinotype, devices like Apple II struggled with memory limitations necessary for storing common Chinese characters.

Sociopolitical factors also influenced technological developments. Mao's proposal to use Latin letters phonetically faced technical challenges and inconsistent teaching during China's Cultural Revolution. However, as China stabilized politically and economically in subsequent decades, pinyin gained prominence as a basis for hypographic input writing.

By incorporating pinyin input with predictive text capabilities by the 1990s, computing advanced towards anticipating longer compounds and passages accurately. Mullaney argues that algorithmic demands from written Chinese significantly influenced overall computer development.

“At an aggregate level,” Mullaney noted, “the experiment these engineers undertook was so successful that it devoured itself... It was so successful that it became invisible.”