IAlwaysReplyLate t1_ixnrvlz wrote on November 24, 2022 at 9:33 PM

To add a historical note: before IMEs, the Japanese keyboards used hiragana or katakana, mostly one kana per key (some were shifted, eg ぁ was Shift-あ). Mostly they had a QWERTY-like layout with some extra keys, but there were several different layouts designed to be more ergonomic - the modern Esrille Nisse can emulate some of the ergonomic layouts. It's still possible to use the kana layouts with an IME, and Japanese keyboards still have the extra keys for switching between writing systems.

For kanji, at least to start with, it was really unavoidable to have a big array. The keyboards used a 9- or 12-layer system, but they were still huge, some running to over 500 keys. Here's an Alps one, with Planck for scale - there's more info and photos on Deskthority. IIRC Chinese typewriters assembled characters in the way Captain_Crispyy described.

tertius_decimus OP t1_ixpmdg4 wrote on November 25, 2022 at 8:25 AM

Woah! Memorizing symbol placement on that keyboard might be a nightmare for foreigner. Of course, the more you use one, the better you get at it, but still... Not to mention the sheer size of that thing and the table needed to accomodate it. Thank you!

IAlwaysReplyLate t1_ixpsm54 wrote on November 25, 2022 at 10:00 AM

Yes. Though given this one was for typesetting, probably not so many foreigners ended up using one - the normal-use computers of the time wouldn't have been able to handle kanji anyway, they had enough bother dealing with hiragana and katakana! (I also don't know how computers handled the rarer kana systems before IMEs - perhaps they just didn't.) Some Western typesetting systems had big keyboards too, often using mechanical switches or even some of the exotica like magnetic switches.

Here's a site with lots of old Japanese keyboards. NEC had column stagger long before the Ergodox!

tertius_decimus OP t1_ixq1zzf wrote on November 25, 2022 at 12:15 PM

Xah Lee site is exactly what I was searching for! Thanks alot! Due to Google's algorithm clusterfuck policy, finding such small useful sites like this becomes increasingly difficult, especially if one doesn't know how to word the search inquiry properly.

IAlwaysReplyLate t1_ixq3hxs wrote on November 25, 2022 at 12:33 PM

Google isn't the only search engine, you know ;) Try Qwant.com or start.duckduckgo.com, or pick a Searx implementation to combine multiple engines.

IAlwaysReplyLate t1_ixq57wi wrote on November 25, 2022 at 12:53 PM

Oh yes, the other thing I could have mentioned is code pages - the predecessors to Unicode, specific to a language or an area. Japanese had two or three, and eventually they worked out a way of switching between them automatically... but the way they found breaks Unicode, so old web pages written for Shift-JIS can go strange if the browser thinks they're in Unicode!