[DUG] OT Mouse

[Jolyon Smith]

"designed to prevent jams" is only partly true.  Yes, the most commonly
used keys are physically far apart but that reflected the fact that when
originally designed they were attached to levers - it was keeping those
levers apart that resulted in the letters being apart, not a desire to slow
typists down per se.

It was also the physical attachment to levers that necessitated the
staggered layout of the keys, rather than a strictly aligned grid.

Now that the keys are no longer attached to levers neither physical
characteristic is required, but to say that it slows down typing is
manifestly untrue given the speeds than can be obtained on the good ol'
QWERTY layout.

In fact, separation of commonly used keys makes typing arguably *faster* -
if they were close together you would likely have much more trouble
striking them in quick succession than their availability on different
fingers makes possible, though in practice it is almost certainly technique
and familiarity with a keyboard rather than physical key placement that is
the biggest factor.

I have a dead tree edition publication of a title which eludes my memory
right now, which explores how different technologies succeeded in the
marketplace.  The true stories behind the success of "inferior"
technologies such as QWERTY and VHS are covered.

In a nutshell, in the early days of the technology touch typing contests
were actually quite common ... as a keyboard designed to slow people down
QWERTY should have been a failure in such contests, against other layouts
not designed to slow people down, right ?

Wrong.

This online article appears to be an extract from, the basis for, or a flat
out copy of, much of the information contained in the book that I have....

http://reason.com/archives/1996/06/01/typing-errors

Every story attributing inferiority to QWERTY appears to be trace it's
source ultimately to a bunch of sour grapes from a competitor.

:)


On 2 November 2011 09:20, Phil Scadden <p.scadden at gns.cri.nz> wrote:

>  >Ah, the old QWERTY was designed to slow us down urban myth raises it's
> head again.  :)
>
>   All right, more accurately designed to prevent jams at speed but I
> would say definitely not optimised for speed typing.
>
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