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How the quest to type Chinese on a QWERTY keyboard created autocomplete
Decades before its rediscovery in the Anglophone world, autocomplete was invented for putting Chinese characters into a computer.
These 44 keystrokes marked the first steps in a process known as “input” or shuru: the act of getting Chinese characters to appear on a computer monitor or other digital device using a QWERTY keyboard or trackpad. From the moment a key is depressed or a stroke swiped, they set off on a dynamic, iterative process, snatching up user-inputted data and searching computer memory for potential Chinese character matches. Today, we know this technique by a different name: “autocompletion,” a strategy of human-computer interaction in which additional layers of mediation result in faster textual input than the “unmediated” act of typing.
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