IBM's 5400 character Chinese typewriter and the woman who mastered it
Fast company have published an interesting article by Thomas S. Mullaney about a Chinese typewriter and its operator, Lois Lew. I thought some of you might get a kick out of it.
"The IBM Chinese typewriter was a formidable machine—not something just anyone could handle with the aplomb of the young typist in the film. On the keyboard affixed to the hulking, gunmetal gray chassis, 36 keys were divided into four banks: 0 through 5; 0 through 9; 0 through 9; and 0 through 9. With just these 36 keys, the machine was capable of producing up to 5,400 Chinese characters in all, wielding a language that was infinitely more difficult to mechanize than English or other Western writing systems.
To type a Chinese character, one depressed a total of 4 keys—one from each bank—more or less simultaneously, compared by one observer to playing a chord on the piano."
Posted May 31, 2021, 9:41 AM UTC · edited
But how do you type numbers?
In case it wasn't a joke: the same way, numbers are also represented by chords.
It was a joke. It’s a joke posted on a lot of 40% or smaller boards, that rely heavily on layers. I guess it just wasn’t funny in this instance.