Tuesday 11 February 2025 – Tom Mullaney (Stanford University): The Audacity of Chinese Computing
This seminar is 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm GMT live on Zoom at https://zoom.us/j/93730315058, and later posted to our YouTube channel.
Session chair: TBC
Abstract: In 1989, a Chinese engineer made an audacious prediction: within his lifetime, Chinese would surpass English as the fastest computational language in the world, where “with leisurely keystrokes, users will be able to reach or greatly outpace the speed of human speech.”
Outlandish as this prognostication was, it has largely come true, with the fastest Chinese inputters reaching mind-boggling speeds of 221.9 characters per minute—or 3.7 Chinese characters every second.
How is this possible? For a person living between the years 1850 and 1950—the period examined in Stanford professor Thomas S. Mullaney’s award-winning book, The Chinese Typewriter—the idea of producing Chinese by mechanical means at a rate of over two hundred characters per minute would have been virtually unimaginable. Within Chinese telegraphy, dating back to the 1870s, operators maxed out at perhaps a few dozen characters per minute. In the heyday of mechanical Chinese typewriting, from the 1920s to the 1970s, the fastest speeds on record were just shy of eighty characters per minute (with the majority of typists operating at far slower rates). In the dawn of the modern Information Age, that is, Chinese was consistently one of the slowest writing systems in the world.
What changed? How did a script so long disparaged as cumbersome and helplessly complex suddenly rival—exceed, even—computational typing speeds clocked in other parts of the world? Previewing his new book, The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age (forthcoming in May), Mullaney charts out the history of computing in China, a terrain that remains unmapped despite China’s present-day status as a global IT powerhouse.
Bio: Thomas S. Mullaney is Professor of History and Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, by courtesy. He is also the Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress, and a Guggenheim Fellow.
He is the author or lead editor of 7 books, including The Chinese Typewriter (winner of the Fairbank prize), Your Computer is on Fire, Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China, and the forthcoming The Chinese Computer—the first comprehensive history of Chinese-language computing.
His writings have appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies, Technology & Culture, Aeon, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy, and his work has been featured in the LA Times, The Atlantic, the BBC, and in invited lectures at Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and more. He holds a PhD from Columbia University.
