Among those who created this character set, whether by hand-drawing drafts of bitmaps for specific Chinese characters or digitizing them using Gridmaster, were Lily Huan-Ming Ling (凌焕銘) and Ellen Di Giovanni. Long before anyone sat down with a program like Gridmaster, the lion’s share of work took place off the computer, using pen, paper, and correction fluid.ĭesigners spent years trying to fashion bitmaps that fulfilled the low-memory requirements and preserved a modicum of calligraphic elegance. That was four times the total memory capacity of most off-the-shelf personal computers in the early 1980s.Īs serious as these memory challenges were, the most taxing problems confronting low-res Chinese font production in the 1970s and 1980s were ones of aesthetics and design. Even a font containing only 8,000 of the most common Chinese characters would require approximately 256 kilobytes just to store the bitmaps. Were one to imagine a font containing 70,000 low-resolution Chinese characters, the total memory requirement would exceed two megabytes. Chinese required a grid of 16 by 16 or larger-i.e., at least 32 bytes of memory (256 bits) per character. A photograph of a Sinotype III monitor displaying the Chinese bitmap font.īut there are tens of thousands of Chinese characters, and a 5-by-7 grid was too small to make them legible.
Nevertheless, the painstaking work that went into its development-including the development of this bitmap Chinese font-was central to a complex global effort to solve a vexing engineering puzzle: how to equip a computer to handle Chinese, one of the most widely used languages on Earth. Sinotype III was never commercially released.
Once these bitmaps were created and stored, the Rosenblums could install them on the Sinotype III by using a second program (also designed by Bruce) that ingested them and their corresponding input codes into the system’s database. Using any Apple II machine, and running Gridmaster off a floppy disc, data entry temps could create and save new Chinese character bitmaps, remotely. Programming Gridmaster-which in hindsight Rosenblum described to me as “clunky to use, at best”-enabled his father, Louis Rosenblum, and GARF to farm out the responsibility of creating the digital font. (A bitmap is a way of storing images digitally-whether as a JPEG, GIF, BMP, or other file format-using a grid of pixels that together make up a symbol or an image.) Multiplied across thousands of characters, this amounted to literally hundreds of thousands of decisions in a development process that took more than two years to complete. Without a font, there would be no way to display Chinese characters on screen, or to output them on the machine’s dot-matrix printer.įor each Chinese character, designers had to make 256 separate decisions, one for each potential pixel in the bitmap. In fact, creating the font for Sinotype III-a machine developed by the Graphics Arts Research Foundation (GARF) in Cambridge, Massachusetts-took far longer than programming the computer itself. While Gridmaster may have been a simple program, the task that it would be used to accomplish-creating digital bitmaps of thousands of Chinese characters-posed profound design challenges. LOUIS ROSENBLUM COLLECTION, STANFORD UNIVERSITY LIBRARY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS Likewise, he had to program the Chinese word processor itself, a job he worked on tirelessly for months. He had to program an operating system from scratch, since Apple II’s DOS 3.3 simply wouldn’t allow the inputting and outputting of Chinese-character texts.
So to make a “Chinese” PC, Rosenblum’s team was reprogramming an Apple II to operate in Chinese. He was developing the font for an experimental machine called the Sinotype III, which was among the first personal computers to handle Chinese-language input and output.Īt the time, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there were no personal computers being built in China. This was “Gridmaster,” a program Bruce had cooked up in the programming language BASIC to build one of the world’s first Chinese digital fonts. A green grid appeared, 16 units wide and 16 units tall. After a string of thock thock keystrokes, the 12-inch Sanyo monitor began to phosphoresce. Bruce Rosenblum switched on his Apple II, which rang out a high F note followed by the clatter of the floppy drive.