Thursday, November 29, 2012

Chinese typewriters and predictive text

Worth reading: Chinese typewriter anticipated predictive text, finds Stanford historian (Stanford University). I’m not persuaded that what’s involved here is any more predictive than a typesetter’s practice of keeping common letters closer at hand, but the idea of a typewriter set up to produce with greater ease the “ready-made phrases” (as George Orwell would call them) of political ideology is eerily fascinating.

comments: 0