The Chinese typewriter

54 points by drauh 9 years ago | 14 comments

The video doesn't play, here's one found on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M77DxXRI014

This one is a more advance "semi-automatic" version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRKAUDHk_MM

jtrip 9 years ago | |

That last video is supremely interesting. If only we could be shown how the printing head worked, mechanically. Does the head 'suck' up the character bits to strike the paper?

kevin_thibedeau 9 years ago | |

I got tired of playing NoScript roulette. I don't know what goes through the heads of web "designers" these days when they can't control the impulse to pull in scripts from a dozen or more sites.

witty_username 9 years ago | | |

If there is subresource integrity, then is there a problem with that per se?

gkya 9 years ago |

TL;DR: The typewriter has 2,500 distinct characters, and in order to increase typing speed, characters that are related meaning-wise are placed together.

As an aside, typewriters are very interesting piece of tech, if you look under the hood. I have one that I use regularly, and it's quite pleasing to use (I've an Olympia Traveller de Luxe).

userbinator 9 years ago |

I suppose having only 2.5k characters available at a time on the tray means it would be used like a cache --- presumably the rarer ones would be kept somewhere else and swapped in as needed.

zokier 9 years ago |

Not knowing a thing about Chinese writing, it seems bit odd that no sort of character compositing system was utilized. Wikipedia has a mention of a "Ming Kwai Nao Can typewriter" which apparently had some novel character compositing, but apparently it didn't gain popularity, at least in China.

astrodust 9 years ago | |

There's so few characters for which this would work reliably that it's basically pointless, plus it would require two or three actions to create a single character, further slowing down your typing.

Some typewriters do have accents as characters you can overtype, but these are simple to add by comparison, they land in consistent places. Chinese characters are anything but consistent.

Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_key

zokier 9 years ago | | |

The introduction section of Ming Kwai typewriter patent is interesting reading (in addition to the classic beautiful drawings): https://www.google.com/patents/US2613795

The concept looks like it should be applicable to computer keyboards, and especially virtual touchscreen ones. Heck, I'm half-curious to prototype such myself just to see how it works.

jhanschoo 9 years ago |

From the video, using a typewriter seems to be sufficiently quick to be more efficient than handwriting, and of course more reliable. I find it a bit of a pity that a more phonetic writing system did not end up taking off. The most interesting bit to me is the shot of the code pages; these code pages remind the contemporary person of computer code pages.

wodenokoto 9 years ago |

I'm amazed that the layout is based on character common bigrams, rather than some logical systems. Imagine the hunting down a character you don't remember where is, or that you've forgotten was replaced with a different key.

Typist must have been extremely familiar with their own device and I would imagine they didn't like to share.

titanomachy 9 years ago |

I can understand why the government would heavily restrict printing presses, but why typewriters? They're only modestly more efficient than handwriting.

jtrip 9 years ago | |

The article mentions an anonymous letter sent to Mao's wife chastising her former love life. The letter was written on a typewriter.

I think the idea was that there should be no means of communication that cannot be traced. Whoever pens an idea should be aware that he/she can be traced back to.