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tertius_decimus OP t1_ixpmdg4 wrote

Reply to comment by IAlwaysReplyLate in Ignorant question to Asians by tertius_decimus

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!

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IAlwaysReplyLate t1_ixpsm54 wrote

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!

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tertius_decimus OP t1_ixq1zzf wrote

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.

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IAlwaysReplyLate t1_ixq3hxs wrote

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.

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IAlwaysReplyLate t1_ixq57wi wrote

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!

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