deskthority

1987 Taiwanese children typing

How can you tell those keyboards are all with Alps switches?

These kids all type with heavy bottoming out style, what are they doing?

The gray/beige strip at the top of the keyboard looks like it has faint blue marks at the right end, but the focus is not good.

I have had Lite-On keyboards like that with white Alps and doubleshot caps.

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The sound is very Alps, or at least Alps-like, I think. DAYUM.

Can we just take a moment to appreciate how fast they are typing?

Keyboard ASMR. What amuses me is the inefficiency of the input. Note that they seem to be typing non-Romanic text.

Can someone explain to me why there is a huge room of kids typing out Chinese documents at insane speed? I am kind of missing the educational aspect of this for the kids and the Gargled translation of the description isn't helping me any...

This is to commemorate the invention of the Changche input method, at a typing competition.

Stabilized wrote: ↑Can someone explain to me why there is a huge room of kids typing out Chinese documents at insane speed? I am kind of missing the educational aspect of this for the kids and the Gargled translation of the description isn't helping me any...

Bing has a slightly less transglarblated description:

Chinese Cang Jie ime was invented by Mr. Zhu Bangfu, Mr. Zhu deeply felt this concept is too important for the future generations to continue the cultural heritage, hence free to provide use, abandon the patent application.

It was in 1987 (nearly 30 years ago), Mr. Zhu to Taiwan Taidong County Long Tianguo Small visit to see Taitung Elementary school pupils in Chinese Cang Jie ime typing, 230 words per minute, breaking the world record, he is very touched, he advised children as long as comfortable typing, after all, hands are meat, avoid hurting hands. Therefore, this lecture is not to encourage typing in the world first, as long as the hope that Chinese learning Cang Jie system concept become a skill, in the future study, work or cultural heritage, there is a great help, selfish people.

I've deciphered this as:

• They're using the Cangjie input method, which Wikipedia has cataloged
• They're typing at 230 Chinese words per minute, which broke a world record at the time
• HANDS ARE MEAAAT
• The patent was apparently, according to this, relinquished by the owner such that it was forced into the public domain.

...

Hands are meat? Well,



A neat sidenote about Cangjie: It can be stored as standard ASCII before decoding and composition, which made it much more efficient than Big5, a more standard Chinese text encoding method which requires multibyte characters.

Good to hear it was a typing competition and not some horrible child labour scenario

indrora wrote: ↑ HANDS ARE MEAAAT

Love the Engrish born from translations like this!
It hits the uncanny valley of being technically right but not something that any English speaking person would say.

Also thanks for the wiki link, I know very little about Chinese input systems I had only ever heard of pinyin. My British mind cannot fathom how you would memorise all the characters and their constituent radical parts!

230 words per minutes???!! Such a speed approaches steno-typists.

Stabilized wrote: ↑Good to hear it was a typing competition and not some horrible child labour scenario

indrora wrote: ↑ HANDS ARE MEAAAT

Love the Engrish born from translations like this!
It hits the uncanny valley of being technically right but not something that any English speaking person would say.

Also thanks for the wiki link, I know very little about Chinese input systems I had only ever heard of pinyin. My British mind cannot fathom how you would memorise all the characters and their constituent radical parts!

Do you have an hour to spare for an explanation?

Also, "hands are meat" actually means "hands are made out of flesh", i.e. not a machine.

y11971alex wrote: ↑

Stabilized wrote: ↑Good to hear it was a typing competition and not some horrible child labour scenario

indrora wrote: ↑ HANDS ARE MEAAAT

Love the Engrish born from translations like this!
It hits the uncanny valley of being technically right but not something that any English speaking person would say.

Also thanks for the wiki link, I know very little about Chinese input systems I had only ever heard of pinyin. My British mind cannot fathom how you would memorise all the characters and their constituent radical parts!

Do you have an hour to spare for an explanation?

Also, "hands are meat" actually means "hands are made out of flesh", i.e. not a machine.

An hour? There should be an easier way to write a HelloWorld with nicer guide.

y11971alex wrote: ↑Do you have an hour to spare for an explanation?

Pinyin is a Romanization of Chinese using the constituent parts from their rough pronunciation. Pinyin IMEs use this Romanization to construct characters, helping the user choose the correct radical set. Wikipedia has more info

So, in principle, Chang-che works by observing repeated patterns in the construction of Chinese characters. Doing it stroke by stroke would be too complex to encode and cumbersome to input. First, the character is split into one, two, or three parts; each part is then decomposed into constituent structures. Each constituent structure exists in an order (so there's a first constituent, second constituent, &c.) However, you don't need to input every constituent structure to compose the character: you only need to enter the only one, the first and last one, or first, second, and last one to constitute the part. Repeat for each of the character's parts and you have yourself a character. Also, there are far more constituent parts than space on the keyboard, so each key is mapped to several constituent parts and is represented by a given character. This exercise is aided by memory as well as a basic understanding of the structure of the Chinese character. Chang-che is largely for people who can write Chinese already, since without this knowledge you can't type in Chang-che.

Here's one that I made earlier.


See that the character is split into a left part and right part. The left part comes first. It can be split into four constituents, but according to the rules, you can only input two constituents for the left part, and specifically the first and last constituents, which are marked in colour here. For the right part, you must enter three, which are the first, second, and last constituents, also marked in colour.

If this sounds ridiculously complicated, it's the reason why I don't use Changche, even though it's faster than bopomofo, which is phonetic. To type properly in Changche takes actual training (it's something you learn at a school).

A room full of vintage computers

Isn't this pure orgy of typing at lightning speed from talented young persons with that awesome wave of gun firing mechanical keyboards sound? A dream for us!

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