THE COLD WAR RIVALRY HELPED LAUNCH THE CHINESE COMPUTER

It was the summer of 1959, and a Cold War was needed to win the United States. In 1957, the Soviet bloc registered a major technical victory with Sputnik 1. The following year, the Communist leadership in China took a major leap and eventually dismantled. In the spring of 1959 in Cuba, Fidel Castro’s fighters forced President Fulgencio Batista to go into exile. The United States needs to gain momentum and demonstrate that it is at the forefront of global affairs. Plan: President Dwight D. Eisenhower unveiled the world’s first Chinese computer.

The invention of the first Chinese computer would be a great victory, a “gift” for Chinese people from capitalism. This would mark a technical and cultural victory for the “free world”, while increasing the possibility of creating a new infrastructure for the publication and translation of content in Chinese. Everyone who owns such a device can flood the world with Chinese texts at an unprecedented rate – possibly a major advertising feature.
Furthermore, for the Chinese language and its speakers, which number more than one billion, it would have ushered in a new era of information technology in which many ideas were possible only for the alphabet world. This means that the Chinese language was not “backward” as claimed by many.

In the midst of this geopolitical drama was “Synotype”, produced by Samuel Hawkes Caldwell, the father of Chinese computing.

Caldwell was a man of many talents. While he was not advising his students as a professor of electrical engineering at MIT, he enjoyed driving the device, until he sporadically appeared as a guest with the Boston Pops team Happened.

One talent that Caldwell could not claim was the ability to speak or read Chinese. His first exposure to the language came thanks to an informal chat with his foreign Chinese students at MIT at dinner time. Between frying bites and dumplings, Caldwell and his students talked about Chinese characters. Later said that there is one fundamental fact about the language that has completely caught the MIT engineer: “Chinese has” spelled “.”

After first thinking that Chinese calligraphy was not subject to any spelling laws, Caldwell soon discovered something contrary: “Strange, it turns out that [the Chinese student] learns to write conceptual characters as much as his alphabet. Learns to write words … Every Chinese learns to write a character. Using the same stroke in the same order. ”

As an expert in designing logical circuits, the idea of ​​harmonized Chinese “satire” stimulates Caldwell’s intellectual curiosity: if every Chinese character is constructed in exactly the same way, then it is possible to design a logical circuit. Be done which is filled with data entry such as Chinese strokes, produced Chinese characters? If Chinese, despite being a non-alphabetic language, offered its own “spelling”, could it be possible to create something that engineers had developed over the years: a computer for the Chinese language?

Caldwell sought help from Lin Jing Yang, a professor of Far Eastern languages ​​at Harvard University. Caldwell relied on it for a comprehensive analysis of the anatomical structure of Chinese characters and for determining the “spelling” of about 2,000 commonly used words. Caldwell and Yang eventually settled on everything 22 strokes: a perfect number to put on the keys of a Western-style typewriter keyboard.

In his terminology, Caldwell aimed to “provide the input and output data needed for a switch circuit, which converts the literal spelling to the location coordinates of that character in the photo storage matrix”.

During his research, Caldwell made a second surprising discovery. Not only is Chinese characters spelled, but, he wrote, “Chinese spelling is meaningless.” It was never necessary for Caldwell to enter each stroke within a letter so that the device could retrieve it from memory. For a letter that consists of 15 strokes, for example, it may be necessary for the operator to enter only the first five or six strokes before reaching the positive match of the cinemotype.

Linguistic symmetry in English can be spelled the word “xylophone” or “crocodile”: the first five letters are enough to form an exact match with the word. “Spell” takes maybe nine letters, then, it only takes five characters to “find”.

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