Early Cangjie System
In the beginning, the Cangjie input method was not a way to produce a character in any character set. It was, instead, an integrated system consisting of the Cangjie input rules and a Cangjie controller board. The controller board contains character generator firmware, which dynamically generates Chinese characters from Cangjie codes when characters are output, using the hi-res graphics mode of an Apple II computer. In the preface of the Cangjie user's manual, Mr. Chu wrote in 1982:
In terms of output: The output and input, in fact, an integrated whole; there is no reason that dogmatically separated into two different facilities.… This is in fact necessary.…
In this early system, when the user types "yk " (for example) to get the Chinese character 文, the Cangjie codes do not get converted to any character encoding; the actual string "yk " is stored. In a very real sense, the Cangjie code of each character (string of 1 to 5 lowercase letters plus a space) was the encoding of that particular character.
A particular "feature" of this early system is that if you send random lowercase words to the character generator, it will attempt to construct Chinese characters according to the Cangjie decomposition rules, sometimes causing strange, unknown characters to appear. This unusual feature, "automatic generation of characters", is actually described in the manual and is responsible for producing more than 10,000 of the about 15,000 characters that the system can handle. The name Cangjie, evocative of creation of new characters, was actually very apt for this early version of Cangjie.
The presence of the integrated character generator also explains the historical necessity for the existence of the "X" key used for disambiguation of decomposition collisions: because characters are "chosen" when the codes are output, every character that can be displayed must in fact have one and only one Cangjie decomposition. It would not make sense—nor would it be practical—for the system to provide a choice of candidate characters when some random text file is displayed; the user would not know which of the candidates are correct.
Read more about this topic: Cangjie Input Method
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or system:
“Probably more than youngsters at any age, early adolescents expect the adults they care about to demonstrate the virtues they want demonstrated. They also tend to expect adults they admire to be absolutely perfect. When adults disappoint them, they can be critical and intolerant.”
—The Lions Clubs International and the Quest Nation. The Surprising Years, I, ch.4 (1985)
“We recognize caste in dogs because we rank ourselves by the familiar dog system, a ladderlike social arrangement wherein one individual outranks all others, the next outranks all but the first, and so on down the hierarchy. But the cat system is more like a wheel, with a high-ranking cat at the hub and the others arranged around the rim, all reluctantly acknowledging the superiority of the despot but not necessarily measuring themselves against one another.”
—Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. “Strong and Sensitive Cats,” Atlantic Monthly (July 1994)