The Chinese Computer

How can Chinese—a language with tens of thousands of characters and no alphabet—be input on a QWERTY keyboard with only a few dozen keys designed for English? Thomas Mullaney, professor of Chinese history at Stanford University, shares insights about this challenge from his book, The Chinese Computer: a Global History of the Information Age in a conversation with Yangyang Chen, a research scholar and fellow at the Yale Law School.This program was generously supported by the Bin Lin and Daisy Liu Family Foundation.The conversation was recorded on June 18, 2024, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, as a part of the CHM Live series. To watch a video of this program, please visit the Computer History Museum's YouTube channel.To learn more about the Computer History Museum and our upcoming CHM Live events, visit our website at www.computerhistory.org