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Before the 1980s, Chinese publishers hired teams of workers and selected a few thousand type pieces from an enormous Chinese character set. Chinese government agencies entered characters using a long, complicated list of [[Chinese telegraph code]]s, which assigned different numbers to each character. During the early computer era, Chinese characters were categorized by their radicals or Pinyin romanization, but results were less than satisfactory.
In the 1970s to 1980s, large keyboards with thousands of keys were used to input Chinese. Each key was mapped to several Chinese characters. To type a character, one pressed the character key and then a selection key. There were also experimental "radical keyboards" with several hundreds keys. Chinese characters were decomposed into "radicals", each of which was represented by a key. Unwieldy and difficult to use, these keyboards became obsolete after the introduction of Cangjie input method, the first method to use only the standard keyboard and make Chinese [[touch typing]] possible.
[[Image:Keyboard layout cangjie.png|thumb|200px|A typical [[keyboard layout]] for the Cangjie method, which is based on the [[keyboard layout#United States|United States keyboard layout]]]]
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[[Image:2008 Taipei IT Month Day1 InstantDict MD6800.jpg|200px|thumb|An electronic dictionary with Cangjie keyboard]]
Despite its steeper learning curve, this method remains popular in Chinese communities that use [[traditional Chinese character]]s, such as [[Hong Kong]] and [[Taiwan]]; the method allows very precise input, thus allowing users to type more efficiently and quickly, provided they are familiar with the fairly complicated rules of the method. It was the first method that allowed users to enter more than a hundred Chinese characters per minute. Its popularity is also helped by its omnipresence on traditional Chinese computer systems, since Chu has given up its patent in 1982, stating that it should be part of the cultural asset. Developers of Chinese systems can adopt it
All methods have their strengths and weaknesses. The [[pinyin method]] can be learned rapidly but its maximum input rate is limited. The ''[[Wubi method|Wubi]]'' takes longer to learn, but expert typists can enter text much more rapidly with it than with phonetic methods. However, Wubi is a proprietary software, and a version of it has become freely available only after its inventor lost a patent lawsuit in 1997.
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