Tech books for Christmas: Food for thought ZDNet

Despite the come-hitherness of the title Robot Sex, a couple of these'I-need-a-gift-for-a-geek' books are the sort where you may want to be out of town when the recipient calls you, depressed, with their feedback. The most fun of the lot is Thomas S Mullaney's The Chinese Typewriter: A History. It's easy to forget that the ubiquitous single-shift typewriter keyboard, designed specifically for our relatively simple 26-letter alphabet and limited use of capital letters (2.5 percent to five percent of text), had competitors when it was originally designed. A typewriter for the Chinese language, which has some 47,000 characters but no alphabet or syllabic structure, seemed so absurd in 1900 that people published cartoons lampooning the idea (which Mullaney reprints). Reading Mullaney sends you looking for more details of those typewriter designs not taken.