[DUG] OT Mouse

[Jolyon Smith]

> And in those early days, a keyboard layout that caused jams would lose
> out to one that didnt but I am unaware of contests in early days on
> alternatives to QWERTY.

If you read the details about those early contests you will find that the
competitors to QWERTY were far from slouches themselves, often coming
within spitting distance of the productivity of the QWERTY layout but
consistently falling slightly short.  It's hard to argue that those
alternatives therefore suffered from jamming and that the anti-jam design
was QWERTY's only advantage.

Jamming issues would have slowed down competitors far more significantly.
 There is surely more than one way to skin the jamming cat and some of
those competitors would have employed those alternative approaches.
 Yet QWERTY consistently bested them, sometimes by only a small margin but
still.  Consistently better *is* consistently better.

Bearing in mind that at that time there was no entrenched body of
experience with QWERTY - each entrant into those early competitions would
have had a far more equal footing in terms of comparing performance with
others.


> A contest now on boards with typists of similar experience on both would
> be more interesting.

Studies conducted now would be very difficult to conduct with a reliable
"baseline" of equality on the part of the entrants.

What *has* been observed more recently is that providing training in
alternatives (e.g. Dvorak) sometimes results in better performance than
those same people previously obtained on QWERTY (even setting aside the now
discredited results of the earliest tests that "proved" Dvorak's
superiority).  However, it has also been observed that providing additional
training on QWERTY also leads to improved results for QWERTY typists.

It really should come as no surprise to learn that training someone to type
efficiently with a given keyboard results in greater efficiency on that
keyboard.  :)


The bottom line is that individuals may find alternatives to be preferable
or even more efficient, but unless you can replace all existing QWERTY
skills in all keyboard users with equal proficiency in an alternative AND
replace all QWERTY keyboards in existence with that alternative in an
instant, then any alternative simply isn't going to gain sufficient
traction to realistically replace QWERTY as the de facto standard keyboard.

Which then begs the question, why bother trying when it will take so much
effort and has such a small chance of succeeding ?

The answer to that usually comes back as : "Because QWERTY isn't the best,
it's an inferior layout designed to slow us down and we owe it to ourselves
to find a better alternative".

Except that this is, as previously laboured, is merely popular
misconception;  not actually based in fact.


Aside - this thread should now really be "OT: Keyboard", surely ?  :)
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