This article was later updated with reference to a popular article on the QWERTY as a market failure http://wwwpub.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html, which basically claimed it’s superiority to other layouts.
http://www.mwbrooks.com/dvorak/dissent.html gives a direct opposition to this attached article’s argument (basically, it claims the dvorak is in fact superior while incorporating the arguments of the previous article).
But the original debate wasn’t Dvorak vs. QWERTY, it was QWERTY vs. <predecessor>. Or more accurately, was the QWERTY intentionally awkward.
And now I’m reading Jared Diamond’s ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’ where he writes that the QWERTY was designed to impede typists.
Now the debate has become so clouded on both sides, does anyone have any solid information on this topic? Can anybody sort it all out?
I’ve seen two TV programmes (admittedly, a few years ago now) and read numerous accounts in books, magazines etc. on this topic, and the widely accepted reasoning is that the QWERTY keyboard was designed that way so that a competent typist who is familiar with the keyboard could still type very fast, but the risk of the hammers(?) hitting each other whilst the user was typing at a fast rate was significantly reduced.
The original layout tried was standard alphabetical, but certain letter combinations caused the hammers to catch each other and jam up. Various combinations were tried (along with a bit of thought about the frequency of letter repetitions in the english language) and the QWERTY layout was devised as one alternative which was found to work very well. This was adopted, and became the ‘standard’, although different layouts were used by different manufacturers. However, the QWERTY layout outlasted all the others and survived to date.
I have seen DVORAK keyboards and also ones laid out alphabetically, and to be honest, any keyboard layout today would work just as easily as the QWERTY one as they would be electronic, not mechanical. Whether a competent typist would type quicker with them is debatable, but I’d be interested to see the results.
From Cecil’s article: “It saddens me to know I helped to perpetuate the myth of Dvorak superiority, but I will sleep better at night knowing I have rectified matters at last.”
Cecil caves too much, his supposed experts were economists with an ax to grind. That should have told him something. I mean, economists?
I didn’t get the impression that the “Fable of the Keys” paper was saying that the qwerty keyboard was superior to Dvorak, rather that the difference between qwerty and Dvorak wasn’t significant enough to justify the cost of switching. If there really was a huge speedup using the Dvorak, then qwerty’s continued survival would be a failure of the market, but since the real-world improvemnet isn’t that great, there hasn’t been much drive to switch.
I’d suggest trying out Dvorak and seeing how you do on it. That’s what I did. I found that I could type slightly faster. 3-5 WPM faster, actually. Which falls in line with the findings of that paper.
I eventually gave up using dvorak after a couple years as the meager speed increase was offset by the difficulty of switching back and forth. For others this isn’t as much of an issue.
Wouldn’t help me, as the constant factor that slows me is the continual typos I must back up and correct. This is common letter juxtapositions, like iton or swapping “i” and “e”, “c” and “d”, etc.
Supposedly, folks experienced with Dvorak, using a Dvorak keyboard, make less typos than comparably-trained qwerty users. If that’s the case, then it would, indeed, help you, Irishman.
What we really need now, as Douglas Adams has pointed out in one of his articles, is a new layout for the keyboard used on handheld devices.
Most handheld devices with typewriter keyboards are designed to be held in both hands and typed on entirely by your thumbs. Clearnly, neither QWERTY nor Dvorak were designed with such a “typing stance” in mind.
Chronos, that’s possible. The typo problems I encounter often include typing with the wrong hand. I type “i” for “e”, or swap letter order when typing quickly.
If you accidentally swap “i” for “e”, that’ll only get worse with a Dvorak keyboard. In the Dvorak layout, all the vowels are right next to each other! (As a Dvorak typist, I accidentally typed “scare” instead of “score” in a paper I handed in to one of my college professors. :o )
This is common letter juxtapositions, like iton or swapping “i” and “e”, “c” and “d”, etc.