My Take | Autocomplete: how Chinese computing kills typing

We are so used to news stories about the technological rivalry of China and the West and intellectual property theft we often miss out that technologies usually evolve and complement each other in ways beneficial to all sides.

Let me just relate one such history that may be obscure to many people but whose impact affects practically everyone nowadays: computer input. If today, people can type just a few letters, in English, Spanish, French or what not, before your WhatsApp or Google guesses the whole word for you, that technology is partly inspired by the early work of linguists and engineers who had to input Chinese characters by working around the almost universal but oft-criticised English-based Qwerty keyboard.

This intriguing history can be found in a chapter titled “Typing is dead”, by Stanford University historian Thomas Mullaney, who co-edited the new book Your Computer Is on Fire.

The world may be divided into two types of computer users: those who use Latin alphabet and others who have to input non-Western or more specifically, non-Latin scripts. They all, however, have to put up with Qwerty and get round it.

The Qwerty, invented in the 1870s, has often been criticised for being hard to learn, inefficient to use and irrational in its arrangement. Still, it came to dominate first typewriting, and then computing. Indeed, a whole economic theory of inefficiency was first proposed in the mid-1980s by US economist Paul David, who tried to explain why Qwerty, given its clear inferiority to other available alternatives, came to take over the world. He put its survival down to “path dependency”, or what has occurred in the past persists because of resistance to change.

I surmise that’s how I have kept my bad habits, even when I am fully aware of them.