Spend a minute or two watching a Chinese person enter Hanzi characters with a Western keyboard, and you'll understand that the Chinese won't ever use computers as much as we do, or at least in anything like the way we use them, because - to put it in a nutshell - Chinese is a lousy language for Scrabble. Themost popular system of text entry works like this: the user types in the Pinyin version of a word (that is, its spelling in the

Roman alphabet). All of the Hanzi characters so transliterated then appear on the screen - sometimes there can be dozens -

and the user chooses the desired one by punching in its number on the list. Then it appears on the screen - sort of. CRTs don't have enough resolution to display the more complicated characters, so the screen fonts consist of simplified versions, and the reader has to puzzle out the identity of a character from its context. Imagine how much time you'd spend computing if you had to transliterate each word into Thai, type it in on a Thai keyboard, pick the right word from a list, and then view the results through a sheet of frosted glass that blurred most of the letters, forcing you to guess the words from their general shape and context.

Shanghai Ikarus Ltd. is run by one Gu Guo-An, who has put in some time at Stanford and Xerox PARC. Its bread and butter is desktop publishing for the Shanghai business community, but in the back rooms Gu is up to more interesting things: his company is the first in the Chinese-speaking world to develop outline fonts, both for the traditional system still used in Taiwan (some 13,000 characters) and the simplified system of the PRC (6,763 characters). They're putting together a set of TrueType characters now - all day long, the employees in the back rooms are busy tugging those pesky control points around the screens of brand-new Mac Centrises.

Forget about PCs with Western keyboards hooked up to modems. When you combine a mind like Gu's with the advent of pen-based computers, which work with non-Scrabbleophilic languages; PDAs capable of shooting messages back and forth via infrared or radio; the rapid growth of the phone system, both wired and wireless; and the obvious Chinese love for pagers, portable phones, or any other gadget that makes them connected, suddenly the future of computers there begins looking very different from the Western approach.