Typing, Spelling and Word processing

Burmese Typewriter

Olympia was commissioned to produce typewriters for Burmese.
Red keys were used to type vowels; the carriage did not go forward. Black keys were used to type consonants.
Back-spacing for half a step was necessary on the portable version to type tha gyee. Manual dexterity was needed to type some pa sint characters.
The office version edition had extra keys (e.g. tha gyee).

Character Sets

The early computers mostly used ASCII and EBCDIC.
It took some time to support other character sets.
The evolution has seen various type face/font families, keyboard layouts, Unicode support, …

IBM produced Selectric typewriters.
Golf ball-like character sets had to be installed/replaced.

Wang Computers provided word processors for various languages.
Ko Htay Aung worked at Wang for a while on the “Burmese” language project.

Chinese characters were input using (1) large tablets (2) three corner method (3) Romaji

Techniques

Burma Research Society (BRS) used transliteration for its publications. For example, “k-o-l” combination represents “ko”. The scheme was used on Macintosh.

Universities’ Computer Center (UCC) had projects to do Burmese word processing. Saya U Myo Min supervised a project for Ma San Yu Hlaing for “collation” (needed for sorting). Saya U Tun Aung Gyaw and his team (Ko Htay Aung, Ko Soe Myint, …) worked on Cromenco System Three for printing and processing. U Soe Win and team worked on Calcomp graph plotters.

We miss the days when we had type perfectly or reasonably well on typewriters using messy carbons.
Also, planning to cyclostyle double-sided printing (odd numbered pages first, then repeat with even-numbered pages).

Spelling

Burmese Language Commission bowed to higher authorities to revise the spelling at least two times.
Fines were imposed on authors and publishers spelling the established way. (e.g. “ta“) instead of the preferred way (e.g. “tit”) despite the scholars pointing out the old inscriptions at “bo ta htaung” (not “bo tit htaung”) pagoda.
CTK (Children’s Treasury of Knowledge) project was “delayed” to “correct” the spellings.

Censorship

It was not easy to write in those days without facing censorship.
It was taboo to quote “Dhammata” poem (by Ananda Thuriya).
It was a crime to mention the “setting sun.