Chu Bong-Foo
| Chu Bong-Foo | |||||||||
| Chinese | 朱邦復 | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Transcriptions | |
|---|---|
| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | Zhū Bāngfù |
| Bopomofo | ㄓㄨ ㄅㄤ ㄈㄨˋ |
| Chu Bong-Foo | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1937 Huanggang, China |
| Residence |
Taiwan Brazil United States (1970s, 1983–1988) Shenzhen, China (1988–1990) Macau, China (1999–?) |
| Nationality | Chinese |
| Fields | Computer Science |
| Known for | Inventor of the Cangjie input method for computers |
Chu Bong-Foo is the inventor of the Cangjie input method, the most widely available Chinese input method. He is said to be the father of the modern Chinese computing, as his public domain input method, created in 1976, has sped up the computerization of Chinese society. Chu spent his childhood in Taiwan, and has worked in Brazil, United States, Taiwan, Shenzhen and Macau.
Chu was born in 1937 in Huanggang, Hubei to father Chu Wan-Yin, also called Chu Huai-bing. His family led a wandering life during the turbulent days of mainland China, and they finally settled down in Taiwan. There he studied at a local high school. He was an imaginative teenager who also spent much time reading fictions, but so much so that it negatively affected his studies. Later he also became interested in cinema. After graduating from Taiwan Provincial Agriculture Institute and his military service, he taught briefly at an elementary school in Hualien. In this period he witnessed the poverty of countryside, and developed a sense of mission for rural development and cultural improvement. Finding teaching not to his taste, he went to Brazil instead to develop his career, only to find life more difficult. Over that period of time, he took up several jobs. It was also during these turbulent times that Chu flirted with the hippie lifestyle and studied at a local conservatory.
However, his work on Cangjie did not begin until he worked at "CULTURAL ABRIL", a publishing house in Brazil, in 1972. From then on, he would dedicate his life to revamp Chinese information technology. He saw for himself how the Brazilians could, in just one day, translate and publish foreign literature, while the Chinese took at least a year. The technology then, coupled with the complexities of the Chinese script, required a painstaking process of picking up type pieces from an enormous Chinese character set. Besides, publishers often encountered characters not included in their set. This meant that the printing of any information in Chinese was much slower than in other languages. In 1973, he returned to Taiwan. He gathered a team to study an efficient method of looking up a character with 26 keys on the common keyboard.
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