An older Hebrew encoding actually encoded the last character first, then the penultimate character, then the character preceding that, etc.

Exercise to the reader to guess how line breaks, text wrapping, and search algorithms worked.

Multiple characters can be written at once, they can also be done in reverse or out of order.

No no, the second character you write must always be temporally preceded by the character you wrote first. Otherwise the second wouldn't have been the second, but the first, and moreover, the first would have been the second, which it wasn't.

You could write multiple characters simultaneously. CRTs sort-of did that, for example, starting characters with ascenders before those without and finishing the characters without descenders before those with descenders.

So, in the word “gif”, they would start writing the “f” first and finish writing the “i” first (just before writing the last part of the “f”. For “if”, writing the “f” would start before writing the “i” started and finish after writing the “i” finished.

In traditional printing “writing” can happen simultaneously for an entire page, but colour printing can make things more complex.

I encourage you to find some place that still uses a Hebrew typewriter. When they have to type numbers, they'll type the number in backwards. And an old Hebrew encoding also encoded characters in reverse order.

I think parent just means that "backwards" is a relative term. Your backwards is someone else's "forward". For someone who is used to reading Hebrew, they would be used to reading right to left and this would seem completely natural, no?

Basically, the numbers 1234 and 4321 are identical assuming one is written left to right and the other is right to left. Then it's just a convention which way you are used to reading.

I know nothing of Old (or New) Hebrew unfortunately so I may be completely off base.

No, because Hebrew words are read right-to-left in Hebrew letters, but numbers are read left-to-right in Arabaic numerals. The direction of reading switches mid-sentence, but typewriters only type in one direction.

Arguably Arabic numbers must always be read right-to-left, even in English, because the least significant digits can be read in order, while the value of the most significant digit depends on the number of less significant digits to the right. So in Hebrew the general reading direction actually fits Arabic numbers better.

And the Arabs actually say the numbers from right to left. It's "one and fifty", not "fifty one".

It's also written right to left. And in general, natural language is "little-endian": Less significant information tends to be mentioned first.[1]

1: https://www.thoughtco.com/given-before-new-principle-linguis...