In August 1983, exactly 40 years ago, a Chinese engineer named Wang Yongmin developed the first popular way to input Chinese characters into a computer: Wubi. He did it by breaking down a Chinese character into different strokes and assigning several strokes to each letter on the QWERTY keyboard. For example, the Chinese character for dog, 犬, has several shapes in it: 犬, 一, 丿, and丶.These shapes were matched with the keys D, G, T, and Y, respectively. So when a user typed "DGTY," a Wubi input software would match that to the character 犬. Wubi was able to match every Chinese character with a keystroke combination using at maximum four QWERTY keys.