Second-language speakers of English outnumbered native speakers after World War II, and today they are more than three times the number of native speakers. Sometimes, this overrepresentation of English is described as an inevitable and unavoidable consequence of the technical limitations of early Internet technology, which reinforced English-only standards developed for the international telegraph. However, the history of technology challenges this idea of an inevitable constraint. Telegraphy before the ARPANet in general, and in China particularly, suggests that these limitations were overemphasized. A user-focused history of computing provides evidence of cultural phenomena that might otherwise be difficult to investigate. Recognizing this history offers compelling nuance to the theory of the social construction of technology and can serve as training to sharpen analyses of the connections between technology and society.