In China, suburban garages don't factor in the lore of computing history the way they do in the U.S. But prisons do – at least, one particular prison in which a Chinese engineer was sentenced to solitary confinement for thought crimes against Mao /1
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His name was Zhi Bingyi and, during long and anxiety-ridden days, months and years of solitude, he made a breakthrough that helped launch China’s personal computing revolution: he helped make it possible to type Chinese with a QWERTY keyboard. /2
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Unsure if he would ever see his wife again, and with no work to occupy his mind, Zhi filled the long hours staring at an 8-character poster on the wall:
坦白从宽，抗拒从严
‘Leniency For Those Who Confess, Severity For Those Who Resist’
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By the 100th reading – perhaps the 1,000th – Zhi began to explode these characters in his mind. The first character (坦), for example, could be readily divided into two distinct parts: 土 and 旦, and then further still into + and −
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Zhi managed to get hold of a pen, but paper was impossible to find. Instead, he used the lid of a teacup, which his captors provided him to drink hot water. When turned over, Zhi discovered, the lid was large enough to fit a few dozen Latin letters.
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Sino-US normalisation brought was an influx of US-built computers and computing equipment into the PRC, personal computers in particular. US companies regarded China as an immense, untapped market for the ‘personal computing revolution’.
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Suddenly, Zhi and his teacup hallucinations took on immense real-world applications. The ‘spelling’ system he made might be the key to cracking the code of QWERTY-based Chinese computing.
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Zhi came on the radar of engineers and technologists in the PRC, as well as two foreign organisations – the Olympia Werke company, a towering presence in the history of German precision engineering, and the Graphics Arts Research Foundation in the US.
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Zhi was sitting in a darkened cell, with long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of dread, tracing out ephemeral alphabetic codes on the underside of a teacup, and eventually dreaming of a fully mature Chinese-language information environment.
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