As the subject said, Wu Bi, an input method in the field of smiling and arrogant typing in the 1990s, has almost been forgotten now. But is Wu Bi out of date? Will it eventually go extinct? Before discussing these issues, let's take a look at its birth history. I. Saving Chinese Input Method Around the 1980s, with the introduction of computers into China, a practical problem appeared-how to input Chinese characters? Although pinyin input method can also solve the problem of 26-key Chinese character input method, there was a view that Chinese characters were backward at that time. Some people advocate "pinyin of Chinese characters", "pinyin instead of Chinese characters" or even "one language and two languages", which makes the input of Chinese characters have no direct relationship with fonts. This is an unprecedented crisis of chinese characters in China's cultural history. At that time, the mainstream thinking of Chinese and foreign researchers was to build Chinese character input keyboards, such as the Japanese "main and auxiliary" key full-character input keyboard, and the Chinese character spelling group "Chinese keyboard" in Peking University, with 256 keys and 1000 components.

1978, Wang Yongmin, who worked in Nanyang Science and Technology Commission, Henan Province, was dissatisfied with the slider keyboard developed by Guang Chuan Factory (used to solve the proofreading problem of Chinese character typesetting machine), and Wang Yongmin, who vowed to make a better Chinese character input keyboard, began research work for five years. At first, Wang Yongming inevitably took the old road of "making a keyboard", but he gradually compressed the keyboard from 188 to 36 keys. All this was done without a computer. After a series of improvements, 1983, Wu Bi font was born. Although it is called "five strokes", in principle, each word only needs four yards at most to enter. It is called Wu Bi because Chinese characters can be divided into five types according to the first stroke, and the 26 letter keys of the keyboard are also divided into five areas, which correspond to different roots, such as wood, eye and female. Wu Bi font uses only 26 letters, and codes Chinese characters completely according to the characteristics of strokes and glyphs. According to Wang Yongming, this means "using scientific methods and designs to make Chinese characters cross the digital divide". Xinhua News Agency praised Wu Bi's movable type as a great invention in the cultural history of China, which is as important as movable type printing. Secondly, from the rolling pinyin input method to the decline, Wubi font has solved the problem of Chinese character input, but it took another ten years from popularization to application. With DEC, the world's second largest computer company, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to purchase the right to use 1986 Wu Bi font, the State Science and Technology Commission and the Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense issued documents to promote Wu Bi font in 1988 respectively, and Wangma 86 and Wangma 98 were embedded in Microsoft Office components. In the 1990s, there was a craze for all people to learn Wu Bi, and finally the Wangma Wu Bi input method was ushered in.

Compared with pinyin input method, Wu Bi's greatest advantage lies in its low repetition rate. Maybe you are using all kinds of intelligent pinyin input methods now, and you don't have much feeling about word selection. With the help of powerful thesaurus and cloud association technology, major manufacturers have minimized the disadvantages of pinyin input method. However, from the 1990s to the early 20th century, the experience of using pinyin input method was not good. It often took several pages to type a word, and the lexicon capacity was pitifully small. The five strokes, which can be typed directly without choosing words, were simply artifacts at that time. A large number of Wu Bi classes and tutorials also came into being. Wu Bi's "Little Overlord" learning machine with a keyboard is a childhood memory of many people. However, the emergence of Intelligent Pinyin has broken the monopoly pattern of Wu Bi in the field of Chinese characters, and has become a boon for users of Pinyin input method. In 2006, Sohu launched the Sogou Pinyin Input Method. This product didn't attract much attention at first, after all, the pinyin input method at that time was already the world of intelligent ABC and purple pinyin. I never thought that the functions of whole sentence input, association input and cloud association initiated by sogou input method, together with the powerful online thesaurus, completely subverted the use experience of Pinyin input method. After that, Tencent, Baidu, Google and other manufacturers have also launched Pinyin input method products, which is nothing more than relying on huge thesaurus, coding optimization and big data optimization, and using technical means to make the speed of Pinyin input method achieve a qualitative leap.