How QWERTY keyboards show the English dominance of tech

Last week, MIT Technology Review published an excerpt from a new book, The Chinese Computer, which talks about how this problem was solved in China. After generations of work to sort Chinese characters, modify computer parts, and create keyboard apps that automatically predict the next character, it is finally possible for any Chinese speaker to use a QWERTY keyboard. It ends with a bigger question about what this all means: Why is it necessary for speakers of non-Latin languages to adapt modern technologies for their uses, and what do their efforts contribute to computing technologies? I talked to the book's author, Tom Mullaney, a professor of history at Stanford University. We ended up geeking out over keyboards, computers, the English-centric design that underlies everything about computing, and even how keyboards affect emerging technologies like virtual reality.