Chinese typewriter
[4] As a student of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Zhou first thought about the practicality of a Chinese typewriter while inspecting American models in Boston.
Instead, his design involved a revolving cylinder that contained the characters ordered by radical and stroke count, like in a Chinese dictionary.
[7] Following improvements to the design by an engineer working for the Commercial Press named Shu Changyu (舒昌鈺), which included replacing the cylinder with a flat bed customizable by typists, the model entered mass production in 1919.
Each of those four-digit combinations corresponded to one of 5,400 Chinese characters, or other symbols such as punctuation marks, which were etched onto the surface of a revolving drum inside the typewriter.
After Japan's defeat and the subsequent nationalization of typewriter companies by the Communist government, locally made models based on the Wanneng continued to dominate the market, particularly the Double Pigeon (双鸽; Shuānggē).
[13] Lin called his typewriter design "MingKwai", derived from the characters 明 (míng) and 快 (kuài), meaning 'clear' and 'quick' respectively.
[14] Lin had a prototype machine custom built by the Carl E. Krum Company, a small engineering-design consulting firm with an office in New York City.
The United States Air Force acquired the keyboard to study machine translation and disk storage for rapid access to large quantities of information.
He also unveiled the Sinowriter, a device for converting Chinese-character texts into machine input codes for processing Chinese into English.
[15] This arrangement was called the 'associative' (联想; 聯想; liánxiǎng) layout, similar to predictive text, and sped typing speeds from about 20 words per minute to around 80.
[20] The Chinese typewriter was ultimately eclipsed and made redundant with the introduction of computerized word processing, pioneered by engineer and dissident Wan Runnan and his partners when they formed the Stone Emerging Industries Company [zh] in 1984 in Zhongguancun, China's "Silicon Valley".
