The Lies You've Been Told About the Origin of the QWERTY Keyboard(theatlantic.com)
theatlantic.com
The Lies You've Been Told About the Origin of the QWERTY Keyboard
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/the-lies-youve-been-told-about-the-origin-of-the-qwerty-keyboard/275537/
3 comments
The truth doesn't matter anymore. The meme that "QWERTY was designed to be inefficient, caught on, and now we're stuck with it" has mythical emotive power, much like "women were worshipped for their mysterious ability to give birth, before agriculture gave us the patriarchy", so much so that Alan Kay still uses "a QWERTY keyboard situation" to describe "network effects of something designed to suck"; and layout hipsters will be touting the superiority of their Dvořák layouts long after the time_t-pocalypse twenty-five years hence.
If you read the paper the actual reasons they propose for qwerty are as bizarre and anti-ergonomic as the arm jamming and "typewriter" demo theory. Namely: putting z,c,e together to help with decoding Morse. Putting the letters i and o near 8 to help type the years 1870 and 1871 faster (early keyboards had no zero and one key), and (topically) switching a couple of other letters to avoid patents, but still vaguely following the original idea of a-m going right and then n-z going left on a piano style keyboard.
This paper completely supports the view that old decisions stick around long after they are no longer relevant even if the exact details differ from the standard version.
This paper completely supports the view that old decisions stick around long after they are no longer relevant even if the exact details differ from the standard version.
It's not about the layout of the keys when coding in perl it's how soft they are for when you roll your face on it.
"More recent research has debunked any claims that Dvorak is more efficient, but it hardly matters. Even in 1930 it was already too late for a new system to gain a foothold."
The text "recent research" points to the Reason article that very few people seem to realise is written by free market fundamentalist economists and not ergonomic historians. These economists believe that there is no such thing as lock-in. According to their theories the market always chooses the best tech. Which means any tech not chosen by the market must be worse than whatever wins.
Yet he contradicts their dogma in the very next sentence after citing them, with the common sense view that entrenched tech can be worse than the alternatives if it gets there first.