Typewriter why qwerty

Then a Cincinnati business-school teacher invented our eight-fingered method of typing. She hadn't yet thought of memorizing the keyboard. But a student of hers had.

He entered a speed contest in and trounced a competing keyboard. Never mind that eight-fingered touch-typing could be a lot faster with a better keyboard. Never mind that the much-used letter A sits under your weakest finger. Never mind that the most-used letter E is off the home row. For Gould, this is a metaphor for the mindlessness of evolution. But he adds a redeeming remark. He says, "Streamlined optimality contains no seeds for change. That's because I've developed my touch-typing skill until it gives me real physical pleasure.

That's kin to the 2-fingered kinesthetic energy my father once flung at his old manual machine. If Sholes really arranged the keyboard to slow down the operator, the operator became unable to catch up the Morse sender.

Although he sold his designs to Remington early on, he continued to invent improvements and alternatives to the typewriter for the rest of his life, including several keyboard layouts that he determined to be more efficient, such as the following patent, filed by Sholes in , a year before he died, and issued posthumously:.

August Dvorak in the s. More recent research has debunked any claims that Dvorak is more efficient, but it hardly matters. Even in it was already too late for a new system to gain a foothold.

It had become truly ubiquitous in countries that used the Latin alphabet. And this why the new KALQ proposal is so interesting. It attempts to break from the tyranny of Christopher Latham Sholes, whose QWERTY system makes even less sense on the virtual keyboards of tablets and smartphones than it does on a computer keyboards.

Is the new KALQ system any different? In some ways, the answer is obviously yes. It has been designed around a very specific, very modern behavior — typing with thumbs. But it could still be argued that the KALQ system, or any similar system that may be developed in the future, is also a product of path dependency.

Because no matter how the letters are arranged, they basic notion of individually separated letters distributed across a grid dates back to Sholes and co. If you gave an iPad to someone who had never used a keyboard and told them to develop a writing system, chances are they would eventually invent a faster, more intuitive system. Perhaps a gesture based system based on shorthand?

Or some sort of swipe-to-type system? Truly, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Looking inside his early machine, we can see how he did it. The first typewriter had its letters on the end of rods called "typebars. The roller which held the paper sat over this circle, and when a key was pressed, a typebar would swing up to hit the paper from underneath.

If two typebars were near each other in the circle, they would tend to clash into each other when typed in succession. So, Sholes figured he had to take the most common letter pairs such as "TH" and make sure their typebars hung at safe distances.

He did this using a study of letter-pair frequency prepared by educator Amos Densmore, brother of James Densmore, who was Sholes' chief financial backer. The QWERTY keyboard itself was determined by the existing mechanical linkages of the typebars inside the machine to the keys on the outside. Sholes' solution did not eliminate the problem completely, but it was greatly reduced.

The keyboard arrangement was considered important enough to be included on Sholes' patent granted in see drawing , some years after the machine was into production. QWERTY's effect, by reducing those annoying clashes, was to speed up typing rather than slow it down. Sholes and Densmore went to Remington, the arms manufacturer, to have their machines mass-produced. In , the first Type-Writer appeared on the market.

No contemporary account complains about the illogical keyboard. In fact, few contemporary accounts even mention the machine at all. At its debut, it was largely ignored. Sales of the typewriter did not take off until after Remington's second model was introduced in , offering the only major modification to the keyboard as we know it today.

The first machines typed only capital letters. The new Remington No. It is called a shift because it actually caused the carriage to shift in position for printing either of two letters on each typebar. Modern electronic machines no longer shift mechanically when the shift key is pressed, but its name remains the same. In the decades following the original Remington, many alternative keyboards came and went.

Then, in , with funds from the Carnegie Foundation, Professor August Dvorak, of Washington State University, set out to develop the ultimate typewriter keyboard once and for all. Dvorak went beyond Blickensderfer in arranging his letters according to frequency. With the vowels on one side and consonants on the other, a rough typing rhythm would be established as each hand would tend to alternate. With the Dvorak keyboard, a typist can type about of the English language's most common words without ever leaving the home row.

The Dvorak keyboard sounds very good. It appears that many of the studies used to test the effectiveness of Dvorak were flawed. Many were conducted by the good professor himself, creating a conflict of interest question, since he had a financial interest in the venture.

General Services Administration study of appears to have been more objective. It found that it really didn't matter what keyboard you used. Good typists type fast, bad typists don't.

It's not surprising, then, that Dvorak has failed to take hold. No one wants to take the time and trouble to learn a new keyboard, especially if it isn't convincingly superior to the old.

A few computer programs and special-order daisy wheels are available to transform modern typewriters or word processors to the Dvorak keyboard, but the demand for these products is small. Word processors increase that speed significantly. The gains that Dvorak claims to offer aren't really needed. One design has large buttons with the common letters grouped around the space button in the centre.

Microwriters have just a few keys and rely on the pattern in which they are pressed to produce letters. The computer keyboard is a direct copy of the typewriter keyboard, so why is the typewriter keyboard arranged in a non-alphebetical order? The answer is so when they typewriters were first introduced they could easily be demonstrated to show how timesaving the device would be by having sales representatives quickly type out the word "typewriter" as all of these letters are found to be on the top row.