September 30, 2009 at 5:30 pm
· Filed under Japanese History, Japanese Technology
With several thousand characters to contend with, how were the Japanese able to use typewriters before the advent of digital technology? The answer is the kanji typewriter (和文タイプライター or 邦文タイプライター), which was invented by Kyota Sugimoto in 1915. This invention was deemed so important that it was selected as one of the ten greatest Japanese inventions by the Japanese Patent Office during their 100th anniversary celebrations in 1985. Here are some photos of that first model. Read the rest of this entry »
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September 20, 2009 at 7:39 pm
· Filed under Japanese Computing
The advent of Unicode has been a huge boon for developers, enabling applications to run on computers throughout the world with little or no effort on the part of the developer. However, there are several quirks in East Asian operating systems that can make applications developed in the west frustrating or difficult to use when installed on an East Asian computer. This post looks at the most basic issues that every application developer should know. Although I focus on Japanese and Windows in this post, many of the issues are equally applicable to Chinese and Korean, as well as other operating systems.
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September 12, 2009 at 9:24 pm
· Filed under Japanese Computing
One of the questions that I see come up a lot is about how Japanese text can be written using a computer, mobile phone, or other electronic device. Since it is a fairly important process for understanding the development of technology in Japan, I thought I would detail the process here.
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