Historical: How was Chinese written in telegrams and early computers? I know about "Chinese Typewriters", the question here is how Chinese was represented in earlier information systems.

For example, Japanese Telegrams were always written in Katakana and many early video games, up to the early 1990s, almost completely relied on Kana for technical reasons.  It follows that early Chinese systems may also have relied on Pinyin or Bopomofo (in Taiwan).  Can sb. confirm this?



(The following is not part of the question, but facts I discovered and want to share here although they don't amount to answers themselves.)

Edit 1

For what it's worth, this page https://classictech.wordpress.com/computer-companies/acer-groupmultitech-electronics-inc-sunnyvale-calif/ claims that the MPF-II-C from 1982 was the first microcomputer to be capable of handling Chinese characters.

Edit 2

A commenter linked to http://www.njstar.com/cms/chinese-commercial-telegraph-code-lookup, it contains the following valuable information regarding the CCC:


  There are total of 9297 Chinese Commercial Codes defined, of which 2593 codes represent different Chinese characters in Mainland and in Taiwan/Hong Kong. Codes below 7902 are caused by the fact of Mainland Chinese character simplification. Such as ccc:0948 --> 国 U+56FD (CN) / 國 U+570B (TW/HK). Due to un-coordinated extension of original codes, codes above 7902 can respresent totally different characters in Mainland and in Taiwan/Hong Kong. Such as ccc:9154 --> 舺 U+823A (CN) / 螵 U+87B5 (TW/HK)
For telegrams, the Chinese Commercial Code (中文電碼) was used.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_telegraph_code

Roughly, to send a telegram, someone needed to go to the post office, write down the text message, info of sender &amp; receiver - by hand, on a form.

Then, the worker would "translate" each Chinese character into 4 digits, according to the Chinese Commercial Code book, something like this:



Then, the message was sent by morse code to the nearest post office to the receiver. The morse code was "translated" back to 4 digits, and looked up again in the Chinese Commercial Code book. Afterwards, the message was sent by a post office worker to the receiver by hand.

The CCC is still used today in Hong Kong: the residents' identity card shows their name in Chinese, English &amp; CCC.



Another service, the telex, which was widely used in the past, cannot handle Chinese characters. As I remember, we only sent Latin characters (A-Z) &amp; numbers (0-9).

It was in the pre-1980 timeframe.

The first computer (OK, personal computer) that could handle Chinese was the ETen Chinese system (倚天中文系統); it dates from about mid-1980.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETen_Chinese_System

Those were the days... :)