A Chinese language card or Chinese character card is a computer

expansion card In computing, an expansion card (also called an expansion board, adapter card, peripheral card or accessory card) is a printed circuit board that can be inserted into an electrical connector, or expansion slot (also referred to as a bus sl ...

that improves the ability of computers to process Chinese text. Early computers were limited in processing speed and storage capacity. If a software like CC-DOS or :zh:UCDOS is being used to render Chinese characters, the Chinese font could take up to 1/3 of RAM, making it impossible to execute large programs. Moreover, Chinese rendering via software must go through the BIOS, so that the speed is as slow as dozens of characters per second.{{cite book, last=朱, first=巧明, title=中文信息处理技术教程, date=2005, isbn=9787302117612, url=https://book.douban.com/subject/1689879/, page=162 Using a Chinese Character card could improve the computer's ability to process Chinese text. The card has a Chinese font burnt on its ROM chip, so that the font no longer takes up computer RAM. It takes internal codes and directly renders the corresponding characters onto the screen, which works much faster than software-based rendering.

Manufacturers

At the beginning of the 1990s,

Lenovo Lenovo Group Limited, often shortened to Lenovo ( , ), is a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in designing, manufacturing, and marketing consumer electronics, personal computers, software, business solutions, and related se ...

( Legend Group), Founder Group, Giant Corporation, and E-TEN were manufacturing Chinese Character cards.

Decline

As computer hardware improved, Chinese character cards were gradually rendered obsolete by

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. ...

. Currently very few computers use Chinese Character cards to handle Chinese text. After

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

began supporting Chinese Language in

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few oper ...

and Microsoft Windows, Chinese Character cards were essentially rendered obsolete.

References

Computer peripherals Chinese-language computing Legacy hardware