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Story: OpenOffice.org development boosted by Arab and Israeli collaboration
Posted by: Sam Johnson (Wednesday 24 November 2004, 8:57 PM)
The worst outcome of the West's domination of technology is the fact that computers naturally work from left to right. Had the Turks won the Battle of Vienna in 1683, or had the Moors won the Battle of Granada in 1492, right-to-left languages would have dominated the world today, and computers would more naturally accomodate diacritical marks and right-to-left text flow.
Hopefully this type of Arab-Isareli technological cooperation will lead to a resurgence of right-to-left text processing, and by the time humans discover time travel we won't have to beg engineers for add-on packages to accomodate what are still considered "second-tier" languages.
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