Rather than slowing the typist down, it would seem that the design was more random. I haven’t found an authoritative source for the contention that Amos Densmore broke up common letter combinations, putting them in separate quadrants of a circle of type bars.
Rather than being intended to slow the typist down, QWERTY was just the first thing besides (presumably) alphabetical that worked with the internal layout of the machine. Indeed, QWERTY may have been a better two-finger layout than alphabetical; but until someone can flesh out the Densmore story, it is unclear whether the the typist’s needs were considered at all.
Oh, and English typing speed records are usually set with the Dvorak layout.
I believe I first read the story of the QWERTY keyboard in Guns Germs and Steel, which is an authoritative source and could possibly go into this Dvorak business.
Yes, thank you. Blogs seem to handle these links for the user; maybe forums don’t?
I’ve read it. I have grave doubts on their point 2). In any case, tomorrow’s argument will likely be about ergonomics instead of speed. A fair study may show an advantage for Dvorak in that category. Their point 3) is very interesting because it implies that the alphabetical-to-QWERTY transformation might have helped both the machine and (coincidentally) the human. But saying that QWERTY is not bad is not the same as saying that it is good. In the same way, the flawed studies don’t necessarily mean that Dvorak is bad.
Interestingly, Koichi Yasuoka claims that Sholes himself tried to improve on QWERTY! If someone can find a source/price for the Yasuokas’ book, please post!
To summarize, it is probably fair to say that Sholes didn’t try to slow the typist down, but any notion that QWERTY was designed for the benefit of the user must be viewed with suspicion.
This forum/board doesn’t, even tho I’ve been campaigning longtime for a sensible, automatic link arrangement, or at least a line of advice for those who don’t know. But so far it’s been a one-person crusade, and a hijack for this thread, so I’ll stop.
Yes, Guns, Germs, and Steel is a fascinating book. Yes, it does posit some interesting arguments. But Diamond is just a guy who did some research into fields he was not the least bit expert on. He is no more authoritative than Cecil or any other writer in that regard. He’s only as good as the references he cites, and those are not always accurate, nor are his conclusions from those references always correct.
GGS is just a good book, nothing more. It’s not authoritative on the history of typewriters.
Maybe one day we can get the dirt behind what on earth was behind the reasoning of a stenographer’s keyboard too (I understand the idea of it, but not the logic comapred to other options!)
I read it, and I find it one of the most shameless pieces of politically inspired “science” this side of creationism. They start out with a desperate need to crush the Dvorakian heretics, and I don’t trust a word they say.
I don’t even have an opinion on the Dvorak keyboard; I’ve never tried it. But I know religious mania when I see it.
Wow, JWK. I found it too abstruse to detect. All I wanted was an actual experiment where people were typing on qwerty vs. Dvorak, and I got an assorted mess of why it might not be superior.
Though, I did notice that all of their calculations seemed to still indicate a slight lead for Dvorak, despite their “conclusion”
As for me, it took me too long to get efficient at Qwerty, and I’m not about to change, especially to a non-standard layout.
ISTM that the “designed to slow down typists” postulate makes less sense to people who never had to use a manual typewriter, or an electric that didn’t have a buffer so your typebars didn’t get in each others way.
And here I get all Grandpa Simpson telling how an original IBM Selectric was a gift from God but a steed I never mastered and that the second generation IBM AT computer keyboard reached perfection and that all other keyboards pale by comparison. And maybe a bit about how, despite some misplaced keys, in reach of the original IBM PC keyboard exceeded its grasp because, though it was smaller, its keys provided TOO MUCH positive feedback, if you users of modern slushboards can imagine such a thing, and was murder on my finger joints.
Then I’d probably sit back and bask in the afterglow of yesteryear and not tell you I’m typing this on a $4 keyboard from Micro Center because I misplaced a keycap for my AT and, anyway, the thing is too damned noisy to use when other people in the house are trying to sleep.
Ah, memories of using an old-school manual typewriter. That thing was humongously heavy (seriously, you could use it to bludgeon someone to death), it made a loud electrical hum, and each keystroke sounded like a small gunshot.
But there’s something really viscerally pleasing about using one of those things, not unlike playing a grand piano.
Maybe it’s the nostalgia filter in me talking, but I still have fond memories of using it, especially when I hear that little “ding”.
You really don’t see that what they’re actually arguing is:[ul]
[li]Capitalism makes everything perfect[/li][li]QWERTY was created by capitalism[/li][li]Therefore, QWERTY is perfect, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a dirty Commie?[/li][/ul]
It’s pretty damned in-your-face.
These are people who have already made up their minds who the good guys and the bad guys are, and who have a deep emotional need for that jumped-to conclusion to be right before even starting to consider the data. That being the case, I don’t trust them one inch.
Note that the venue in which their paper appears is not a journal of ergonomics, but a purely political one, dedicated to the proposition that capitalism is society’s summum bonum.
The whole “QWERTY was intentionally designed to slow typists down” canard irritates me for some reason.
It’s bullshit. The purpose of QWERTY was neither to slow typists down nor (as is alleged to be the case with DVORAK) to let them type at their fastest, but rather to minimize the likelihood of the long bars that had the actual chars on the end of them smacking into each other as previous letter is on its way down while next letter is rising up. In an indirect way — i.e., if such an event were not prevented — the keys will jam and you have to stop typing to pull the damn things apart, which obviously slows you down rather spectacularly, so in that sense QWERTY could be said to exist to speed typists up, but not by having the keys in the optimal position for typists so much as putting them in the optimal position for the typewriter itself.
Previous post here giving more specifics of how QWERTY avoids that problem. (Except that in that post I had meant to type the “r” and “t” keys not “e” and “r” keys)
It’s irrelevant on modern keyboards (even as recent as an IBM Selectric typewriter, with the character-golfball thingie, then the subsequent daisy-wheels; the problem was specific to the old U-shaped valley of long lettercharacter bars.
Actually, the QWERTY keyboard was first invented for one of the “invisible printing” machines, which had a quite different mechanism. Many early typewriters printed from underneath, and the operator could not see the results until later. (Manufacturers who sold such machines claimed that visible printing was a distraction that slowed down the operator.)
Did they also have unmarked keys so you were forced to touchtype and keep your eyes on the copy? Typing, er, KEYBOARDING, teachers would love that.
I’m an indifferent typist, but I learned long ago to keep the two separate. I typed up a friend’s resume and when I was done she asked how it sounded. All I could say was, “I don’t know. I wasn’t paying attention. The letters go in my eyes and out my fingers.”
The best, fastest keyboard would use a sort of T9 technology (like cell phones) to reduce the number of keys (possibly, to 10).
A more direct criticism I had for the Dvorak was its goal of separating letter combinations to oppose sides of the keyboard (ie, alternating hands). This didn’t seem very efficient to me at all. Better to put common letters immediately next to each other, so that you can hit both near-instantly with one hand. I think this was another “feature” designed for mechanical, manual typewriters.
