🚀 go-pugleaf

Read Weaver repeats, and Scott Horne echoes, a classic "urban myth":

>Yes, QWERTY was designed to slow down typists to prevent them from jamming
>the machines.  (It doesn't fulfill that purpose, though:  I can jam a manual
>typewriter.)

The QWERTY keyboard, also known as the Scholes keyboard after its inventor,
was NOT intended to slow the typist down.  Scholes was indeed trying to avoid
jamming, but by improving the machine, not by crippling the typist.

The classic typewriter had a basket of keys.  When successive keys both near
the center of the basket were struck the likelyhood of a jam was highest.
What Scholes did was to study letter pair frequencies and try to arrange
things so that many common pairs of letters would cause the successive keys
to come from opposite sides of the basket.  Failing that, he at least made
common successive pairs NOT come from near the center of the basket.

Since the basket and the keys were connected by mechanical linkages, there
were severe constraints on key placement.  Hence Scholes ended up creating
the keyboard we use to this day.

>	       Oddly enough, some keys very often pressed in sequence are
>located next to each other (_e.g._, `e' and `r', `i' and `o').
> 

What's important is not how close the KEYS are, it's how close the correspon-
ding levers (or whatever they are called) are in the basket.  Also, again,
successive keys near the periphery are not as big of a problem, since they
angle between them will cause them to diverge fairly quickly.

>So why aren't we all typing on Dvorak keyboards today, now that we have
>computer terminals that don't ``jam''?  Old habits die hard....  Alas,
>alack....
> 

Convention is a big part of it.  But there is another part:  The Dvorak key-
board has taken on an almost mystical attraction to "scientific" types, who
feel that a logically better solution has been denied for silly social
reasons.  The facts, however, are by no means clear.  The experiments showing
the superiority of the Dvorak keyboard are mainly old, were done by people who
were actively trying to prove that superiority, and are not up to modern
experimental standards.  Recent data - I've been told the references by some-
one who works in the field, but I'm afraid I don't have them - show that there
is actually only a small difference in typing speed between Dvorak and Scholes
typists.  (Even if you believe the old data, BTW, it didn't really answer the
right question.  It was claimed that the fastest typists on a Dvorak keyboard
were significantly faster than the fastest typists on a Scholes.  However,
this was at levels that very, very few people ever attain, and says nothing
about how average typists will do on the two keyboards.)

Part of the reason for the lack of difference between the keyboards is that
Dvorak carefully created a keyboard based on the best scientific data and
model of typing then available.  But it turns out that that model is just
plain wrong!  Dvorak assumed that typing was accomplished by striking a series
of individual keys.  So he placed the common keys near the center, where they
could be reached with the least movement.  However, actual measurement of
skilled typists shows that they type n characters of running English text sig-
nificantly faster than n times the time it takes them to type one character.
What they are actually doing is typing pairs and even triplets of common char-
acters as a unit, much faster than they could type the individual characters
that make up the unit.  A side-effect of the Scholes layout is to place many
of the common "units" on alternating hands, which makes typing them easier.
Dvorak, on the other hand, tends to place many units under the SAME hand,
which interferes with typing.

This "typing in units" effect was described in a Scientific American article
a couple of years ago.

Dvorak fans often seem like fans of "universal languages":  If only we had a
logically designed universal language to replace English, Russian, Chinese
and all the rest, we could all talk and eliminate misunderstandings and war.
And if we only all used a logically designed keyboard we'd all type much
faster.  'Tain't so.

If you REALLY want to type much faster, learn to use a chorded keyboard.  It
takes a lot of training - court recordors train for YEARS - but you can get
impressive results.
							-- Jerry