Dvorak keyboard

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
102

‘‘It had its chance in the marketplace and it lost!’’

‘‘One reason that the Dvorak keyboard was never accepted was because the manufacturers never advertised that it was available, never gave any demonstrations of its advantages, etc. Obviously, if the public did not know the DSK existed, they would not demand it.’’ Note the quote marks.
I spend a good bit of time at the library at the nearby community college which has a fair sized student body and asked about twenty kids if they had ever heard of it.

Not a one had although it is required for admission that new students be at least minimally qualified in IT (information technology );otherwise they have to take remedial computer course.

–All of them learned to type on their own or in a high school classroom where no other keyboard was ever mentioned.

103

More from the same source.
xxxx
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Unbiased test'' by the General Services Administration: What really almost killed the DSK was a test conducted by the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) in 1956, under the direction of Dr. Earl P. Strong. If you ask anyone in the U.S. Government about the DSK, they will invariably say that the GSA test proved’’ that the Simplified Keyboard wasn’t any good. The conclusions of this study state, in part: ``… the Standard Keyboard results are better … recommendation for the adoption of the Simplified Keyboard for use by the Federal Government cannot be justified based upon the findings of this experiment.’’

However, some old correspondence that has recently come to light seems to indicate that Dr. Strong might not have been the impartial researcher'' he claimed. In a letter dated September 13, 1949, Dr. Strong states: … I have developed a great deal of material on how to get this increased production on the part of typists on the standard keyboard. Consequently, I am not in favor of purchasing new (i.e., Dvorak) keyboards and retraining typists on the new keyboard, and I am out to exploit it to its very utmost in opposition to the change to new keyboards.’’ This seems to indicate that the U.S. Government ought to conduct some new, more objective tests, and that the data and results of these tests ought to be made freely available to the public for open discussion.’'xxxx

Now if Dr Dvorak cannot be accepted as an honest advocate for his biggest accomplishment then it hardly seems fair to take the word of this DR STRONG that the DSK is no good does it?
I haven’t google searched this one sentence but I swear on my Momma’s grave that I composed it myself.LOL

The best is yet to come.

But it is getting late and I have an early appointment tomorrow.

104

Mac, Mac, Mac…

You’re making me waste** my 7,500th post** to point out the exceedingly obvious:

[ol]
[li]**[COLOR=Purple]You’re not telling anyone here much of anything they didn’t already know.[/li].
[/COLOR]
[li][COLOR=Purple]If there was a conspiracy or government inaction or suppression of the DSK, it predates the atomic age.[/li][/COLOR]Time to move on now, really. Everything else including use of keyboards has. Have you tried the DSK on a smartphone lately?
.
[li]Every single person reading this could switch to DSK in one minute flat, if they had the slightest inclination to.[/li]At zero cost in near zero time and there’s near zero usage… you might want to think about why that is. You’ve been given some good feedback. But…
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[li][COLOR=Purple]If you’re reading anything posted here in reply, there’s no sign of it.[/li][/COLOR]**You just keep dumping “proof” by the thousand-word. (Re-read #1, and Google up “TLDR” while you’re at it.)
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[li]Time to stop, I think, and maybe take your crusade to fresh territory, read some of what’s been written in response, or possibly talk to someone on that side of the keyboard, if you know what I mean.[/li][/ol]
But I do have to admire your dedication. Hey, have you read up on the JFK assassination lately?

105

Oldfarmermac, I have removed your three posts where you reproduced in totality copyrighted material.

That’s not how you do things here.

From the registration agreement, which you may read for yourself here:

You cannot totally republish work on this site. We allow reasonable “Fair Use” quoting where you can use short relevant excerpts of someone else’s work or links to the entire material, but you cannot simply paste in an entire article.

Even if it is your own work and you own the copyright, it is tedious and rude to expect other people to read lengthy material on the SDMB.

We also see that out of the 35 postings you have made to the SDMB since you got here, 31 of them are concerning the Dvorak keyboard. We appreciate that everyone has their likes and dislikes, but this is bordering on zealotry. It’s great that you think this is superior but it’s sounding like you’re on a crusade here, or pushing an agenda, or selling really hard, all of which are violations of our use policy and can get a user removed from the board. As stated in the registration agreement:

106

Thanks, I apologize for reading and following the rules and if I ever post here again I will adhere to them.

I want to say this much more and I will be finished with this topic here for good.

The staff did not do a thorough job originally but at that time it would have been hard to do a better job without a major expenditure of time and money so the staff cannot be faulted.

I just intended originally to point out the truth as I see it and hoped the staff would revisit this topic given that the internet makes research so easy these day and that switching keyboards is free and easy now.

But the audience has insisted that Dvorak is no good by referring to studies none of them have seen or read or questioned from the pov of the authors possibly having agendas of their own.

They have challenged me to prove my case and I can prove it in spades.

But I can’t prove it without posting the actual materials since the audience insists the proof does not exist.

If any body wants to see as much proof as they could ever want to see I will be posting it at another site where I have full permissions to do so.

I will post the address of that blog here later if any body wants to check it out and posting it is not against the rules.

When I first discovered this site I read just about all the original stuff Cecil and his helpers put up and I will say this for it .

The only time they dropped the ball so far as I know is this time and that is a remarkable record given that the resources of the staff must be rather limited .

The thing about straight dope is that once in a while everybody is wrong.

I have accomplished my goal in that open minded people who are interested in better ways to do things will check out the DSK.

Every body else will of course continue to believe whatever they have always believed about any and every topic including the DSK unless somebody hits them with a brick.

The usual fate of messengers who bring unwelcome news is to ignore them and if that doesn’t work then to get rid of them.

Thank you for not banning me but I didn’t find anything else in the archives that really grabbed me and I don’t have anything else that I want to discuss here so I won’t likely be posting again other than once in a very long while.

That’s the nature of the naked ape.

And yes, I knew that before I posted any thing here.

107

I challenge you to quote a single comment from within this thread to back this statement.

I don’t believe anyone has said “Dvorak is no good.” That’s a battle entirely in your own mind.

At the very most they (and I) have said it is not good enough - does not demonstrate *enough *real-world superiority, especially NOW, not in 1945 - to force any kind of mass switch or warrrant any mass educational effort, not in a world that’s nearly 100% QWERTY.

Every single person here has pointed out that it’s readily available, for free, for anyone who wants to use it, and is one minute of minor technical twiddling away.

Frankly, given the dearth of ANY OTHER ALTERNATIVE KEYBOARD LAYOUTS in the vast Windows and iOS language sets, I’d call that a victory for old August.

But I’m quite sure that you will go to your grave convinced that some mysterious conspiracy in the 1940s set the world on a wrong path that only your efforts can correct. And that gaining a few percent in typing efficiency, even at incalculable cost, would make the world a paradise.

We all have our hobbies. Glad you’re done with yours here.

108

This post has been typed by the typist!

109

In Lt Cmdr Dvorak’s defense, I watched the first part of Run Silent, Run Deep the other day and realized that Clark Gable’s character, a skipper of a Gato who was obsessed with running drills to improve crew efficiency, might have been based on Dvorak! I didn’t watch more because, though I love time studies as much as the next manufacturing engineer, they do not make for gripping drama. :wink:

110

I used Dvorak for years. I finally abandoned it because I frequently had to use other peoples’ keyboards. It is also a lot of work to reassign key bindings in all of your software programs, even if they allow it. It has to be done for each program separately.

But ultimately, Dvorak keyboards actually penalize us lefties. I was going to a lot of trouble and getting very little, if any, benefit out of it.

111

Could you please elaborate?

112

I suspect he means in the mouse+keyboard arena, which is highly optimized for right-handers anyway and may be much worse using DSK.

Which is an argument for going back to DSK typewriters, I think.

113

Actually, it might provide a benefit. Unless you are opening threads, dropping a one line response, posting, and then jumping to the next thread, and not actually reading any content, you are not likely to hit the posting frequency limit. If the time you spend writing is sped up by 10 to 20%, that means you can get 10 to 20% more board surfing done. Or something like that.

Except the reality is that most of the time is spent reading the threads. Then you run into the fact that typing speed is not necessarily composing speed. And of course you have editing/proofing your text, and rethinking the structure of your sentences and paragraphs, and generally verifying the message you enter is what you want it to be. All of those are the mental tasks or mouse tasks where keyboard speed is irrelevant.

So the reality is that you might slightly speed up your ability to enter the texts of your posts.

At the cost of having to learn a new key layout, flipping the switch in your OS, and then ensuring you always only use your own computer. Plus you might have to acquire some key stickers to relabel your keys, or else pop them off and reinstall them in the new layout so you don’t get lost when learning the new system.

And that’s the biggest bug to me, the always use your own computer. At work, I had an assigned desktop, but frequently would go to lab spaces or conference rooms or other facilities and borrow common work computers. So then I have to either figure how to configure all computers on the fly for each use, or else swap between keyboard systems.

Meh.

114

I type for a living as a Unix admin, I had a real life experience with co-worker who seems very similar to our dear Oldfarmermac. They were a Dvorak evangelist, among being subject to other evangelisms. In their zeal, they’d set the keymap on shared keyboards to Dvorak and never, ever set them back when he was finished. Anyone not familiar with this keymap (every one of his co-workers) that had to connect a console to the server after him was usually either forced to reboot the machine (it at least it didn’t remap ctrl-alt-del), or were forced to go do the research necessary to figure out how to reset the keymap (an unusual task) on an unusual keyboard layout.

Now, this person made bad tech decisions based on his other evangelisms every damn day. I wasn’t his superior at the time, so I couldn’t stop him. I was tasked with cleaning up his messes long after his departure - I could write at least a pamphlet about that living nightmare*. So, my hatred of Dvorak may be colored by association. Use whatever keymap that makes you happy on your workstation, hell make it all the letter b. If you can perform work with it, I don’t care. But these days, if you set a shared keyboard in my datacenter to Dvorak and don’t set it back after you are finished, I will cut your fingertips off with my pocket knife. We aren’t paid by the character, we are paid for all the thought that goes behind the commands we type. Because by the time we get involved, things are probably badly broken. NOC techs can usually handle the easy stuff like network configuration errors causing the box to be down, by the time we’re typing on a box in person, it plain won’t finish booting.

I had learned that evangelists (Baptists, Linux, Phish/Grateful Dead fans, Qmail, Emacs, VI ( umm, me? It’s a fair cop), Emacs (why are there no nano evangelists?) BSD, Windows, OSX, Latter-Day Saints) were a pain in the ass long before that experience, but I’ve never been in the position of “If you hire that guy back, even as my employee, I will quit.” until I’d met the Dvorak evangelist. I guess if you take away my ability to talk to a computer due to your pseudo-religious fixation with “the best”, I take it kind of personally. Don’t do this. At the very least, I will rant about how stupid you are to anyone who will listen.

  • Seriously, scripts with the majority of comments in the form of quotes from Ayn Rand and Thomas Hobbes. Thanks, you’re the Bob Dylan of perl scripts. <Sigh> At least he wasn’t as bad as the guy who was using variable names EXCLUSIVELY like AA, XX, ZZ in a script that our systems DEPENDED on to deliver email, and broke itself constantly. And the nitwit that wrote that encrypted his paradigm of bad coding, probably to hide how tragically hilarious it was.

At least the worst thing said about my code was that it looks like it was written by five different people!

Ok. I’ll stop and go to bed now.

115

And in the end, I am not aware of any reasonably modern tests that show any advantage to DSK. Can anyone point to a study that is (1) in the electronic keyboard era and (2) uses a reasonable methodology and large enough sample size to (3) show that DSK has any speed or ergonomic advantage over QWERTY?

Too many of the supposed “proofs” consist of a typist who showed how slowly she typed on her QWERTY Selectric and then how amazingly fast on the DSK version. Uh huh.