Dvorak keyboard

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
42

Not really. The problem with metric is that if it isn’t a wholesale changeover, it’s less useful and just a hassle for both sides. Different keyboards (including truly efficient models that are other than a flat array, never mind the key layout) can be implemented on an individual basis without affecting anyone else or anyone else’s choices affecting you.

Once things like the natural keyboard and the exotic “double bowl” models came along, I expected there to be something of a trend towards people taking their preferred keyboard with them to work etc. Didn’t happen. But then, the widespread yawn that faced the Dvorak since the 1930s was a useful predictor of that…

43

In the spirit of the StraightDope I did some simple experiments today.

Consider the ultimate ease of typing: a magic keyboard with only one key that keeps changing to the next letter every time you press it. It reads your thoughts, but you still have to “type” for some reason. Maybe it was an evil magician that made it and this is his sense of humor at work.

Anyway, in one minute I can hit the same key 377 times, at 5 chars per word which is standard gives me a 75.4 wpm “typing” speed.

A slightly more convenient magic keyboard would have 2 keys, doing an alternating scheme with one finger on each hand gives me 680 chars per minute, or 136.0 wpm now. Not quite double the speed of one, and on the par with excellent typists.

Each extra finger presumably adds a diminishing return, asymptotically approaching some upper bound which is probably somewhere around the record holder’s 212 wpm burst speed. Seems quite plausible - I “spammed” keys for a full minute and got 1445 chars, for 289 wpm. My slowly growing novella is full of words like “hfjksfdsajk” and “jklgfdsjkghsld” though, I don’t expect it to top the reader’s list…

So alternating hands & fingers is clearly key (pardon the pun!). :stuck_out_tongue:

The stated advantage of Dvorak is that the most used keys are on the center row, but doing some reading online both essentially have the same fundamental advantage (hand/finger alternation often required) and same basic constraint (the alphabet is much larger than 8 letters, so no matter what you pick as “home keys” finger movement will always be needed).

It seems clear that there should be an advantage to an efficient layout, and equally clear that the advantage is probably small given the physical limits on how fast fingers can be made to move even in the best case scenario (my experiment above).

As evidence toward this conclusion, I submit the link above, the fastest typing speed ever was apparently 216 wpm by Stella Pajunas in 1946 on an IBM Model A (QWERTY) - essentially even with Barb’s record of 212 with DVORAK mentioned earlier in this thread. Since they are at the most basic level equivalent technology this isn’t too shocking but with the points discussed already I was hoping for a larger distinction…

44

Yes, there are, and part of my job is finding all the flaws in what they write. Reading for comprehensive is nice in theory, but it does require writing with that goal in mind, doesn’t it?

I don’t know that that is true anymore. Transcription - pure typing, no proofing, editing, etc - is, IME, a contract job now, and DOES get paid by the job, not the hour. But, as I said, IME.

45

I think that the article linked to in the column, “The Fable of the Keys” is pretty comprehensive and makes for some pretty nice reading.

46

I’ll quote myself from an earlier thread but will also point out that I’m far proselytizing about dvorak. I could not care less if people switch.

47

Personally I do not doubt that qwerty will remain the default go to layout because schools and educators are among the most hidebound of all institutions and professions.That’s me.

We’re a wee bit snarky there, aren’t we? Most people learn to type on there own. My sons can type about 45 wpm simply because they grew up with keyboards. They could have used a Dvorak layout if they thought it would help. They used Macs and Macs came with a Dvorak keyboard layout. thats you

I hold a Collegiate Professional Certificate issued by the Commonwealth of Virginia and taught seven years in three separate school systems and know dozens of teachers who just about all agree with on this point.

Be honest now;did anybody ever show your sons that they could switch to Dvorak and how and iuf so do you really think your kids would have done something differently than their peers?

It is my experience that ninety percent or more of the people in this country have never even heard of Dvorak and probably not even one percent know that they have free built in Dvorak in their computer.

I am a regular in my local Apple store and have asked a couple of dozen people about it in the last few days including the store employees and none of them knew anything about it at all except beyond the fact that they had heard of it.

The people in a position to fund such studies are almost all in the camp of those with a vested interest in qwerty and keeping pot out of drugstores because they can’t patent it. me again

It’s illegal to use federal government money to study the use of Dvorak keyboards because it can get you high?

I could and should have done a better job of expressing myself at this point.
The federal government has no obvious stake in either keyboard but there are many people in it such as those who are employed at the Department of Eduction who are content to let sleeping dogs lie because one, stirring the pot provokes the boss and two because the boss probably should have investigated such things and failed to do so.

Pharmacuetical companies do not promote research on pot because it is a generic and there is no money in it for them but in can destroy the market for some very lucrative patented drugs which is actually happening so they have done all they can to maintain the fiction that pot is a dangerous addictive narcotic.

The only people who have tried to destroy Dvorak all have good ulterior motives for doing so.

On the other hand nobody can make any money promoting Dvorak so and that is why nobody is paying for studies to promote it.
So, Big Typewriter is suppressing the use of the Dvorak keyboard?

Big Typewriter arguably did at one time do what it could to prevent Dvorak from becoming the new default standard because it would have cost them money and trouble but Big Typewriter no longer exists.

Virtually every new computer sold these days incorporates Dvorak as built in freeware which should tell you something about what the programmer and marketing people at Microsoft and Apple think about it but they have no incentive to actually try to get their customers to use it.

I suggest that any body who really wants to know if Dvorak has been the victim of a hatchet job read the link Folly put up at 10:02 pm today called the fable of the fable .

I am not copying it because I am not altogether familiar with the way this site works and don’t want to lose this comment before I post it if the link is hot and takes me away immediately.

If that is not enough to convince anybody who reads it that the hatchet job is real then nothing short of a brick upside the head could get their attention.

48

Two things:

  1. Clicking a link will open another tab. The original one will remain.

  2. You really don’t get it, do you? Dvorak had its chance–still has its chance–and it failed and continues to fail, despite being an option on nearly all computers ever made. Nobody needs to type 170 WPM anymore, and the real difference between a good Dvorak speed for a normal user and a good QWERTY speed is negligible. You are building conspiracy theories with no basis in fact and berating people because they are not driving an Edsel like you. (FTR, by the standards of the late 50s Edsels were not bad cars, but the reasons for the brand’s failure is a different thread.) Dvorak was a marketing failure 75 years ago, and the years have not been kind in that its original reason for existing–faster and error-reduced typing for humanoid typing robots–no longer exists because that job no longer exists.

49

Where you came up with the idea that I think there is a conspiracy against Dvorak is a little beyond me. Certainly there is no conspiracy these days although the eevidence that just about every body who has published any thing about it has had an axe to grind is excellent.
It doesn’t take a conspiracy to ignore a new technology if you are standardized on an old one and have a strong vested interest in it.

The teaching of typing in the US and so far as I know just about every where else is dominated by teachers in public schools who have the best possible motive to keep their mouths shut about it because if it were to be adopted they themselves would have not only learn it but also prepare new lesson plans and tests and so forth.

That’s a lot of work for salaried employees that are unfortunately not as highly motivated as their pr machine would have you believe.

If you had ever been a teacher and tried to change the way anything is done in a public school you would soon understand the meaning of dug in bureaucratic inertia.

The vocational department head doesn’t want to hear it , the rest of the typing teachers don’t want to hear it the principal doesn’t want to hear it the assistant superintendent doesn’t want to hear it.

The school board doesn’t want to hear it either.

If you need an example or this consider the fact that although millions of people are utterly convinced that the Apple operating system is substantially superior to the Microsoft system, it is almost unheard of that any introductory IT class is taught on Apple computers.

But there probably not a single soul left who uses a computer that has not at least heard of Apple computers and just about every body knows at least one person who swears by his Apple.

Nevertheless nobody that I know of is actually teaching the Apple operating system as the default system. It is not taught for instance in any local public schools and it is not taught in the community college is system in either Virginia or North Carolina or any other state so far as I know.

I made the switch from Windows myself a sometime back and will never go back and I have not yet met any body who has voluntarily gone back to Windows after owning an Apple unless compelled to do so at work.

Is there a conspiracy against Apple ?Not at all.

There need be no conspiracy for a technology to be ignored by the educational establishment.

I am retired now but since I have started this discussion I have contacted a couple of business teachers I know and neither one of them had even heard of Dvorak.

As I have said upthread I never expected to change any qwerty users mind.People are creatures of habit and they automatically defend their own behaviors and habits and they are especially prone to getting their hackles up if somebody points out something about their personal habits, beliefs or skills that might possibly be less than optimal.

It is true that most people can get by just fine with qwerty and that most people don’t spend a large part of their work day typing.

But these facts are utterly irrelevant to the question of which layout is inherently superior.

That is the question I started this discussion with and I will continue to point out that it is the question this discussion is about.

There is no reason now that somebody just learning to type should start on an inferior system when a better one is available free and accessible in a few seconds on almost every computer sold these days.

My goal is to make sure as many people hear about it as possible.

Dvorak can save any body who cares to learn it anywhere from five or ten percent on up to fifty percent of the time they spend typing for the rest of their life.

A couple of minutes here and a couple of minutes there adds up to one hell of a lot of extra productivity if you are a busy professional of any sort who must do some typing.

My sister the nursing instructor for instance tells me that a nurse typically spends up to an hour a day entering data in patients computerized records and that every minute is precious.

There are a dozen billing clerks in any hospital that type at least a third of the work day and there is a legal secretary assisting just about every lawyer who spends at least a couple of hours typing every day.

Every cop in the country has to fill out a rather long and involved report almost every time he arrests somebody.

Most teachers spend at least a couple of hours a week typing and most business managers find that it is faster to type a lot of their correspondence themselves than it is to interact with a secretary.

Any body who thinks that working people in any sort of managerial or professional environment don’t spend a lot of time typing is simply fooling himself.

50

Mac, it’s evident from the length of your posts that you’re getting the very most from your Dvorak keyboard.

But you are arguing at length against something that no one is counter-arguing to any significant degree. Anyone who wants to can switch to Dvorak in five minutes. However, as the advantages of Dvorak are somewhere between greatly overstated and minimal, and based mostly on demonstrations from more than 50 years ago on mechanical keyboards, there just isn’t much to base a convincing argument on. The ubiquity of QWERTY, even through decades of the typing pool, argues more for its superiority than some questionable comparisons of long ago do for Dvorak. It is superior because is it more efficient to learn to use what the entire world uses than to trade some questionable improvement in speed for being out of step with 99.999% of the keyboards in use worldwide.

But I suspect you will continue your crusade. :slight_smile:

51

I think you’re missing something important in your “more productivity with Dvorak” argument.

I’m a legal secretary, have been for a decade and a half. I’m really good at my job. I get paid a darn good hourly rate. I do transcription, and I also do a lot of other stuff. If my typing speed were to magically improve by 10% or 20%, what would that get me? More work. Not more pay, not more “Paula, you’re awesome”, not more chocolate on Administrative Professionals day. Just more work. And my employers are perfectly satisfied with the amount of work I produce now. Why should I go to the trouble of learning a new keyboard layout, when there is no direct reward in it for me? :confused:

52

I too have held a job where the more I accomplished the more was expected of me and I felt the same way.

But it didn’t take me too long to figure out that my own unique little tricks were the ticket to my having an extra five minutes here and there for myself and if you want to you can do the same as you improve.

Remember that in the end you work for yourself and not your employer. How many days would you show up if the shyster, er attorney , you work for stopped paying you?

Now if you work in an environment where you have an opportunity to distinguish yourself such as assistant to a team involved in a fast moving court case or business negotiation your extra efficiency might get you a raise and some chocolate.

I repeat myself once again because every time I do so I will get thru to a few more people.

There aren’t any legitimate studies comparing the two layouts because all of them have involved people already proficient on qwerty and all of them except the ones run by Dvorak himself were run by people who had a vested interest in proving that Dvorak is not superior to qwerty.

Nobody is going to fund a truly independent study because there is no incentive to do so except to prove the point.

I am going back and copy and paste a couple of things to illustrate this point in another comment to follow shortly since breakfast is ready.

53

Amatuer Barbarian says that it is more efficient to use qwerty because other wise one would be out of step withe 99.999% of all keyboards when in the second previous sentence he says any one who wants to switch can do so in five minutes.

It will take any where from a couple of minutes to an hour or longer depending on one’s computer skills to switch the first time.

But thereafter it takes only about two or three seconds on a Mac. I think it is about as fast on a pc too but since I don’t use a pc these days I am not sure.It may take a few seconds longer but if you know how to do a macro it then it will take only a couple of seconds after that.

I put an icon on my tool bar that switches for me with two moves. I put the cursor on the icon and a menu drops down and I select whichever option I want and left click and it is done.

Some people buy a set of key stick on key covers which are dirt cheap and available with both letters on the same cover in different colors half sized to help them make the transition but I never look at the keys since I trained myself to touch type properly with Dvorak.

The standardization argument simply does not apply on an individual basis anymore and we are free as individuals to make the switch.

54

A quote from the man who is at the root of the one study done in the last sixty or seventy years, the one quoted so often as proving qwerty is equal to Dvorak:

Suspicious enough, but there’s more. As evidence of Dvorak’s possible bias, the “Fable” article quotes some of Dvorak’s enthusiastic comments about overcoming QWERTY’s flaws. Cassingham quotes a different sort of statement written by Dr. Strong a few years before he conducted the GSA study:

“I have developed a great deal of material on how to get this increased production on the part of typists on the standard [QWERTY] keyboard. …I strongly feel that the present keyboard has not been fully exploited, and I am out to exploit it to its very utmost in opposition to the change to new keyboards.”

There are other reasons to suspect Strong and his GSA study harbor bias against Dvorak, but I think that quote just about says it all, don’t you?

This is copied directly from the article linked to in this this thread somewhere up above.

55
56

From the link above:The Fable of the Fable

You might hear comments from time to time about studies showing Dvorak is “no better than QWERTY,” or words to that effect. All such comments that I’ve heard seem to echo an article, “The Fable of the Keys,” by S. J. Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis, published in the Journal of Law & Economics, vol. XXXIII (April 1990).

Note the word “economics.” Liebowitz and Margolis are economists opposed to an “excessive inertia” theory, for which OWERTY is often cited as an example. Rather than try to prove their point with a generally valid argument, they simply attack Dvorak as a dubious replacement for QWERTY. As the article’s last footnote explains, there are a number of other possible reasons for Dvorak’s failure to replace QWERTY, besides a perceived lack of value. The article ignores those reasons, however, and perpetrates that false perception in a nicely self-fulfilling way.

The argument involves perception in more ways than one. If you read the article carefully, you will find that it seems to claim more than it actually does claim, especially after its implications get paraphrased a few times in conversation. Because their effect is just as powerful, I will address its implications as if they were clearly stated claims:

Claim: Dvorak Is a Fraud, Studies Prove It’s No Better
Claim: Dr. Dvorak Was a Mercenary Huckster
Claim: Dvorak’s Keyboard Failed, So It Must Be No Good
Claim: It Was Always Easy To Convert Typewriters
Claim: QWERTY Was Designed Ergonomically
Claim: The QWERTY Standard was Established by Competition
Claim: Market Economics Prove Dvorak Is Inferior

The economists involved had professional skin in the game because they would have professional egg all over their professional reputations forever if they had had not come to the conclusion that Dvorak is inferior to qwerty.

57

I am unwilling to waste 5 minutes x X of my life to read back. :wink:

Has it been mentioned that QWERTY was ‘selected’ as the best alternate layout to slow typists down, to prevent keys from jamming-up on old manual typewriters?

Sure, a rare person, such as the lady above, can achieve maximum speed with the aid of perfect timing, but the vast majority of typists at the time could not.

58

If it’s so good, why isn’t everyone using it? Clearly, a good question. There are a lot of reasons for it, and they are too numerous and complicated to explain fully here (they are fully explained in the book The Dvorak Keyboard). Mainly, the Qwerty keyboard became entrenched in tradition. By the time Dr. Dvorak came up with his design, there were hundreds of thousands of typewriters, and it would have cost millions to convert them all over. The switch was just about to be made, but then World War II broke out, and the War Dept. ordered all typewriter keyboards be set to the most-common standard – Qwerty – and typewriter manufacturers retooled to produce small arms. By the end of the war, Qwerty was cast in concrete.

There are other reasons, too. Unbelieveably, there are people with personal vendettas against the Dvorak. In 1956, a U.S. government researcher published an astoundingly biased “study” that railed against the Dvorak layout. When other researchers found the conclusions suspicious, they asked to see the raw data – but the government researcher had destroyed it all! Yet the anti-Dvorak still point to the “study” by the General Services Administration as “proof” that there’s something wrong with the Dvorak. But their “evidence” doesn’t even exist. Such vendettas exist now, too. The most commonly quoted anti-Dvorak screed over the past few years is one by Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis. Randy responded to that one way back in 1995 (copy of that here).

Certainly, people are using it. How many? Who knows – unlike typewriters, which needed precision mechanical work to convert them, computers are by their nature programmable, and it’s a cinch to convert them to Dvorak. So how many people have actually done it? The only way to really find out is to do an expensive controlled survey, and no one is rushing forth with the money to fund such a study.
The so called evidence supporting qwerty as being equal or superior to Dvorak which is the foundation of just about every argument put forth against Dvorak WAS DESTROYED BY THE AUTHORS.

Nobody has ever seen it!

Who , who , who is biased ?

59

Okay, now you’re spamming: That is a direct quote from http://www.dvorak-keyboard.com/, which appears to be a fully-owned subsidiary of http://www.thisistrue.com/, with a link to https://secure.thisistrue.com/index.php?l=product_list&c=3

It doesn’t take a Dvorak keyboard to be a productive typist when all you are doing is cutting and pasting, Randy.

60

Maybe, but that’s a great simplification of the matter repeated by every lazy Odd Facts editor. There were many keyboard layouts in the early days, successively refined, and ONE goal of QWERTY was to distribute the keys that jammed most often… so that typing would be faster. If it were genuinely as deliberately-inefficient as this shitbit implies, it would have lost the early wars once the mechanics improved enough to eliminate jams.

But Mac’s on a crusade and he won’t stop until we’ve repainted every fire truck in America a slightly different shade of red that was once shown in a test of five subjects to have better visibility between 5:30 and 7:00 PM. :smiley:

61

I see, so I am required to suspend logic, or withdraw?

I’ll withdraw, as I prefer my head to be in one piece.