Urban legend or truth - Design of keyboard

[maleficent]

I've read that the arrangement of the letters on the keyboard was originally designed to make it hard for people to type. The design was created for antique type writers. The metal arms would tangle up if a person typed too fast so they rearranged the letters to slow people down. Anyone know if this is true?

What would the arrangement of letters look like if it were arranged to be as easy as possible?

 

[Yo Ma Ma]

The Dvorak Keyboard is supposed to be much quicker.

 

[GoldenBear]

I believe the type of keyboard you're looking for is called a DVORAK or something like that..there was a thread on it a while back, so you can do a search for it.

But I don't feel any constraints with the QWERTY set up, as it's somewhat logical here..

 

[maleficent]

so that's what it would look like, huh. If the old typewriter story isn't true, does anyone know what the thinking behind the current design is?

 

[dennilfloss]

It's a myth and maybe dvorak isn't really faster. Here's the real reason for this design.

Qwerty connections

Comeback (Taproot)

 

[bonk102]

intersting thread, i learned a lot from this little conversations actually, thanks

 

[maleficent]

thanks for the link, I've always been courious about that.
The article says that the key arrangement was simply a default arrangement because the inventor carefully arranged the connecting metal bars so they would not tangle when we typed commonly paired letters such as t and h. He wanted to speed up typing by avoiding "lock ups."

Of course, since we don't have that problem anymore, the letters seem random.

As for the DVORAK, it said that experiments may have been flawed thus creating doubt about it's speed.


I wonder what we would have come up with if we never had typewriters - if we had no precedent upon which to base keyboard design.

 

[Tauren]

Worthless information: the longest word you can type, using only the top row of keys and in english, is typewriter.

I love worthless info.

 

[Adul]

Wortless information. AKA trivia. :Q

 

[Adul]

Wortless information. AKA trivia. :Q

 

[Doggiedog]

My family used to have a manual typewriter and I can assure you that if you type fast, the keys would lock up. I type like 75wpm and I would have to slow down considerably in order to type on a manual typewriter. I can't imagine the kind of lockups you'd have on dvorak keyboard manual typewriter.