NY hosts a Chinese type of exhibition

NEW YORK - An exhibition featuring Chinese typewriters and word processors is currently under way in New York, offering unprecedented insight into the still-evolving history of one of the world's oldest living languages.

The exhibition, Radical Machines: Chinese in the Information Age, explores the historical significance and technological innovation behind Chinese typewriters and the role they played in the survival of the Chinese language in the information age.

For centuries, written Chinese had presented fascinating puzzles for engineers, linguists and entrepreneurs. A Chinese typewriter, which inputs a language with no alphabet, and with more than 70,000 characters, had long been regarded as technologically impossible, according to experts. With help from the global community, China solved these puzzles, enabling the ancient language to continue into the information age.