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Lädt ... The Chinese Typewriter: A History (2017)von Thomas S. Mullaney
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Melde dich bei LibraryThing an um herauszufinden, ob du dieses Buch mögen würdest. Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch. Quite interesting. Yet it's not a definitive wrap up of the question. The author planned...a sequel, taking us all the way from the XIXth century to the brink of new era and a typewriter shape we all are quite used to, but abandoning the story at that faithful moment, leaving us still with a cumbersome 2000-3000 character slow device, about to be substituted with the conventional (for us, and breakthrough for the Chinese) specimen. Arrgh! :D What a teaser of 500 pages! ( ) Zeige 2 von 2
While narrating the invention of various Chinese typewriters and the biographies of their long-forgotten inventors, Mr. Mullaney, a professor of Chinese history at Stanford, also writes on the nature of written Chinese, the sound of typewriters (gada gada gada in Chinese), the consequences for typewriting of Japanese occupation of China, the encoding of Chinese for telegraph use, the feminization of the clerical workforce, and more. This is all far from dull, but comedy survives in some of his self-consciously florid phrasemaking: “We will crawl into the manholes, crawlspaces, and airshafts of Chinese,” he promises, “exploring all of the complex and fascinating meaninglessness that makes meaning tick.” [...] So, far from being dull, the story of the Chinese typewriter turns out to be part of the early history of computing. Any dullness in the book arises from writing that is sometimes both as repetitive as typing and as leaden as type itself. Often an idea that’s fresh and interesting but quite simple is labored over until it takes up a page and a half. Mr. Mullaney closes with an extended advertisement for a second volume, to be the first history of Chinese computing. It may seem premature to say so before this further volume appears, but with a little editing a single book might have sufficed to “make meaning tick.” Auszeichnungen
How Chinese characters triumphed over the QWERTY keyboard and laid the foundation for China's information technology successes today. Chinese writing is character based, the one major world script that is neither alphabetic nor syllabic. Through the years, the Chinese written language encountered presumed alphabetic universalism in the form of Morse Code, Braille, stenography, Linotype, punch cards, word processing, and other systems developed with the Latin alphabet in mind. This book is about those encounters--in particular thousands of Chinese characters versus the typewriter and its QWERTY keyboard. Thomas Mullaney describes a fascinating series of experiments, prototypes, failures, and successes in the century-long quest for a workable Chinese typewriter. The earliest Chinese typewriters, Mullaney tells us, were figments of popular imagination, sensational accounts of twelve-foot keyboards with 5,000 keys. One of the first Chinese typewriters actually constructed was invented by a Christian missionary, who organized characters by common usage (but promoted the less-common characters for "Jesus" to the common usage level). Later came typewriters manufactured for use in Chinese offices, and typewriting schools that turned out trained "typewriter girls" and "typewriter boys." Still later was the "Double Pigeon" typewriter produced by the Shanghai Calculator and Typewriter Factory, the typewriter of choice under Mao. Clerks and secretaries in this era experimented with alternative ways of organizing characters on their tray beds, inventing an input method that was the first instance of "predictive text." Today, after more than a century of resistance against the alphabetic, not only have Chinese characters prevailed, they form the linguistic substrate of the vibrant world of Chinese information technology. The Chinese Typewriter, not just an "object history" but grappling with broad questions of technological change and global communication, shows how this happened. A Study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute Columbia University Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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Google Books — Lädt ... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)681.61Technology Manufacture of products for specific uses Precision instruments and other devices Pens, Pencils, and Printing Typewriters ; mechanical typesetting machinesKlassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt:
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