Historical: How was Chinese written in telegrams and early computers?
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... :)