
The Chinese typewriter - drauh
http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-chinese-typewriter-snap-story.html
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fuzzythinker
The video doesn't play, here's one found on youtube:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M77DxXRI014](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M77DxXRI014)

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

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kevin_thibedeau
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.

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

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gkya
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).

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userbinator
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.

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zokier
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.

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astrodust
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_key)

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

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astrodust
That thing looks impressively if not fiendishly complicated.

That seems like it's not an overtyping system, but one of selecting a single
character based on a series of keystrokes.

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jhanschoo
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.

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wodenokoto
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.

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

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jtrip
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.

