Thomas Mullaney’s new book tells the story of the engineers who wouldn’t abandon China’s written heritage for the ease of the keyboard and how their efforts paved the way for auto-complete and artificial intelligence.
If you’ve ever watched anyone text with Chinese characters, you most likely overlooked the chasm dividing the 3,500-year-old writing system from the digital age. It took decades of engineering to make the more than 80,000 characters of written Chinese accessible through the compact alphabetic keyboards that are today’s passkeys to information and commerce.
That history is the focus of the new book The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age (MIT Press, 2024) by Thomas Mullaney, professor of history in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences and co-director of SILICON. The story gets underway in 1959, when an MIT engineer released a prototype of the first Chinese-optimized computer just as Communist leader Mao Zedong proclaimed that China needed to adopt the Latin alphabet to become fully modern. In the three decades after the release of that prototype, called the Sinotype, engineers in China, Taiwan, Japan, and the United States devised a host of ways to reconcile China’s written tradition with keyboard computing.
“This is not a story of Chinese engineers solving a Chinese linguistic puzzle,” Mullaney said. “Rather, it’s a story of engineers all over the world who became transfixed, even haunted, by a wickedly hard problem.”
Their idiosyncratic solutions evolved with computer technology and hit upon some of the now-familiar methods we use to interact with computers today.
“On the surface, the Chinese characters look the same on paper and on a screen,” Mullaney explained. “But if you look under the hood, the technology is completely different. The engineers who made that possible found a way for a fifth of humanity to participate fully in the digital computing age and utterly transformed the technology along the way.”