Comment by mrweasel
2 years ago
It interesting to consider that both Japan and China might have been prevent from ever being first with general purpose computers. ASCII, and other encoding schemes, only needed to make provisions for less than 200 characters, making it possible to implement with the limited storage and memory available to early computers. The shear amount of characters in some languages, like Chinese may have served as a distraction or roadblock for early computers in the those countries.
Makes you wonder what limitations of our own language and culture are preventing us from inventing certain things?
In an alternative history timeline it might be true.
In our timeline I highly doubt whether it was the main reason why general purpose computers didn't happen first in China or Japan.