According to Thomas Mullaney, it is possible that development of modern Chinese typewriters in the 1960s and 1970s influenced the development of modern computer word processors and even affected the development of computers themselves. In the 1950s, typists came to rearrange the character layout from the standard dictionary layout to groups of common words and phrases. Chinese typewriter engineers were trying to make the most common characters be accessible at the fastest speed possible by word prediction, a technique used today in Chinese input methods for computers, as well as in text messaging in many languages. This arrangement was called the "lianxiang" (“connected thought”) layout, similar to predictive text and sped typing speeds from about 20 words per minute to around 80.