Tom Mullaney: The Chinese Typewriter: A History

Tom Mullaney, a historian at Stanford, gives a Letterform Archive lecture on the history of the Chinese typewriter. He explains how a script with thousands of characters was made to work on a machine and what that meant for later input methods.

HN people recommend the lecture as the fuller, more serious version of the story that podcasts and articles only skim.

“Here's the man himself covering this subject in more depth and with more seriousness”