Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards

Today, typing in Chinese works by converting QWERTY keystrokes into Chinese characters via a software interface, known as an input method editor. But this was not always the case. Thomas S. Mullaney’s new book, The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age, published by the MIT Press, unearths the forgotten history of Chinese input in the 20th century. In this article, which was adapted from an excerpt of the book, he details the varied Chinese input systems of the 1960s and ’70s that renounced QWERTY altogether.