Rick Funderburg wrote:
Tracy R Reed wrote:
I have always been annoyed by the fact that QWERTY was designed to
slow us down
That is a myth (or at least there is no good evidence of it).
A quick googling produces a number of documents from various sources
with sufficient detail as to be somewhat convincing. For example:
http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html
"The operative patent for the typewriter was awarded in 1868 to
Christopher Latham Sholes, who continued to develop the machine for
several years. Among the problems that Sholes and his associates
addressed was the jamming of the type bars when certain combinations of
keys were struck in very close succession. As a partial solution to this
problem, Sholes arranged his keyboard so that the keys most likely to be
struck in close succession were approaching the type point from opposite
sides of the machine."
One of the sources of confusion might be this:
http://home.earthlink.net/~dcrehr/myths.html
Which says that the keys are arranged to allow people to type FASTER.
But in this context faster means faster than if the keys were arranged
for faster finger movements which would cause the mechanism to jam
causing you to have to stop and mechanically unjam the machine so your
overall rate of typing was slower. So in that case QWERTY did allow you
to type faster on average by reducing the speed at which you typed so as
to avoid a jam.
There is also the case to be made that frequently used keys were put far
apart from each other primarily to make the mechanism work out so that
it did not jam as much but the result is the same in that it slows down
the typist.
Everyone seems to be in agreement that QWERTY was not designed to allow
people to type fast and efficiently in a modern context and that the
design of QWERTY has no redeeming qualities. The fact that it is a
defacto standard is the only thing that keeps it around. I am happy to
dump it as a standard as soon as I find a viable replacement which might
be a handykey or might be a dvorak. My big problem with dvorak has
always been that programs like vi and other things have the keys chosen
due to their logical physical layout on the qwerty keyboard and changing
that layout would seem to be very distracting. But the Datahand keyboard
doesn't really even have a layout as far as conventional keyboards go so
I think it should be less of a problem.
--
Tracy R Reed
http://copilotconsulting.com
1-877-MY-COPILOT
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