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How Cold War rivalry helped launch the Chinese computer

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https://aeon.co/ideas/how-cold-war-rival...e-computer

EXCERPTS: [...] The invention of the first Chinese computer would be a major victory, a ‘gift’ from capitalism to the Chinese people. [...] Whoever possessed such a device could flood the world with Chinese texts at a rate never before seen – potentially a major propaganda advantage.

Moreover, for the Chinese language and its speakers, who numbered over 1 billion, it would have inaugurated a new age of information technology that many thought was only possible for the alphabetic world. It would mean that the Chinese language was not ‘backward’ in the way that many had claimed. At the centre of this geopolitical drama was the ‘Sinotype’, a machine devised by Samuel Hawks Caldwell, the father of Chinese computing.

[...] In the course of his research, Caldwell made a second startling discovery. Not only did Chinese characters have a spelling, but, as he wrote, ‘the spelling of Chinese characters is highly redundant’. It was almost never necessary for Caldwell to enter every stroke within a character in order for the machine to retrieve it from memory. For a character containing 15 strokes, for example, it might only be necessary for the operator to enter the first five or six strokes before the Sinotype arrived at a positive match.

An English-language analogue might be the spelling of the word ‘xylophone’ or ‘crocodile’: the first five letters are sufficient to form a match with the complete word. What took nine letters to ‘spell’ might therefore take only five letters to ‘find’. Indeed, the difference between ‘spelling in full’ and ‘minimum spelling’, as he termed them, was often dramatic. Certain characters in his test sample required 11 strokes to compose, but only five to ‘find’. By taking advantage of these (and other) factors, Caldwell concluded, it might be possible ‘to build a machine that will permit composition in Chinese, from a keyboard, at least as fast as composition in English’. Caldwell had not only invented the world’s first Chinese computer. He also unwittingly invented what we now know as ‘autocompletion’....
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