The article mentions how writing evolved through several stages: (a) clay tokens, (b) replaced with 2-D signs, (c) evolving into phonetic signs, (d) settling in

The article mentions how writing evolved through several stages: (a) clay tokens, (b) replaced with 2-D signs, (c) evolving into phonetic signs, (d) settling into two dozen letters each representing a single sound. Over the past 50 years, another stage has occurred via the keyboard. They allow the 95 Ascii symbols to be entered easily, and control keys enable changes to the fonts, sizes, colors, or even tokens displayed. The pinnacle of this change is the IME's for Chinese and Japanese, enabling people to type in spoken sounds (pinyin or kana) with a selector, but allow Hanzi or Kanji to be displayed. Quite useful for tiny smartphone screens.