The first peripheral we need to examine is the printer - specifically, dot-matrix printers. Dot-matrix printing and the metallurgical depths of alphabetic order
#MASS EFFECT 1 FACE MODS SOFTWARE#
When encountering programs such as “Chinese DOS,” the knee-jerk reaction in the Western world has been to treat them as just more “Chinese knock-offs.” What this simplistic narrative fails to understand is that without the kinds of “forgeries” we will examine in this article, none of these Western-designed software suites would have worked at all in the context of Chinese character computing.
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Second, I’ll dismantle the oversimplified idea of Chinese “copycatting” and “piracy” that has dominated, then as now, Western accounts of Chinese computing during this pivotal period in the late 1970s and 1980s. To achieve even basic functionality, Chinese engineers needed to constantly push against the boundaries of off-the-shelf computing peripherals, hardware and software. Like the typewriter before them, computing devices, languages and protocols were by and large invented first in English-language contexts and only later “extended” to other languages and to writing systems other than the Latin alphabet.
#MASS EFFECT 1 FACE MODS SERIES#
When we turn our attention to this broader ecology of computing - on printers, monitors and all of the other “stuff” needed to make computing work - part two of this series on Chinese computing spotlights two conclusions.įirst, the dominance of alphabet-based computing - “alphabetic order,” as I call it - went far beyond the question of keyboards and computer memory. It was a messy, decentralized and often brilliant period of experimentation and innovation. Element by element, engineers in China and elsewhere rendered Western-manufactured computing hardware and software compatible with Chinese.
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To the contrary, all of these devices exhibited the same kind of English-language and Latin alphabetic bias found in, for example, the early history of telegraphic codes and mechanical typewriters, as I’ve explored in my other research.ĭuring the 1980s, what ensued in China and the Chinese-speaking world was a period of intense hacking and modding. While we call them “peripherals,” suggesting a sort of supporting role, they are in fact at the very center of computing in Chinese, from the extreme limitations that Chinese computing faced in the 1970s and 80s to the immense strides and successes it has experienced from the 1990s onward.ĭuring the early rise of consumer PCs in the 1980s, no Western-manufactured personal computer, printer, monitor, operating system or other peripheral was capable of handling Chinese character input or output - not “out of the box,” at least.