Computer technology has traditionally been the sole domain of a "techie" elite,
fluent in both complex programming languages and in English -- the universal
language of science and technology. Computers were never designed to handle
writing systems that couldn't be translated into ASCII (American standard code
for information interchange). There wasn't much room for anything other than the
26 letters of the English alphabet in a coding system that originally couldn't
even recognize acute accents and umlauts -- not to mention nonalphabetic systems
like Chinese.
But tradition has been turned upside down. Technology has been popularized. GUIs
(graphical user interfaces) like Windows and Macintosh have hastened the process
(and indeed it's no secret that it was Microsoft's marketing strategy to use
their operating system to make computers easy to use for the average person).
These days this ease of use has spread beyond the PC to the virtual, networked
space of the Internet, so that now nonprogrammers can even insert Java applets
into their webpages without understanding a single line of code.