Wednesday, November 04, 2020
Brilliant flip
A Quora answer on the subject of Dvorak keyboards contains a sharp insight. The usual view of QWERTY is that Sholes developed the arrangement to slow down typists so they wouldn't tangle the keys.
When I was "building" the original Sholes and comparing it to Hammond, I followed the usual view.
The Hammond keyboard was arranged appropriately for letter frequency, not QWERTY. Sholes and Glidden used QWERTY to avoid key collisions, but key collisions remained common on Remington-style machines. Key collisions were physically impossible on the Hammond, so there was no reason to sort the keys peculiarly. Your right fingers had the vowels and more common consonants, and your left fingers had the rest.
The Quora commenter simply turned the causation around.
Sholes avoided key collisions so typists could type faster.
Brilliant. Agrees with experience. Colliding hammers slowed you down tremendously because you had to stop, reach into the inner workings, and pull the hammers apart, getting your fingers inky. Less collisions meant less stoppages and less inky.
Most of the commenters are correct on the basic question of adopting Dvorak. For the fingers themselves, there's no meaningful difference between arrangements. Humans can adapt well enough to different forms of a tool, as long as the tool is STABLE. Switching to Dvorak would destabilize the SKILLS and destroy the SKILLS.
A more important inconvenience on the usual computer keyboard is the parts that were added for the computer. The standard keyboard puts WAY too much load on the little fingers, which tend to make about 50% of all the strokes; and doesn't give the thumbs any extra work.
¶ 12:49 AM 
