There is the likelihood of "lock-in" to inferior standards. But perhaps the QWERTY keyboard, some state, was designed purely for a marketing premise and not a premise that would actually create higher productivity. It can even be found in the Encyclopedia Britannica as evidence of how human inertia can result in the choice of an inferior product.
The examples of how QWERTY became a standard usually overlooks the sequence of events of history and how markets really are formed and react and act. The economic theory that somehow winner-takes-all capitalism perhaps the a typewriter monopoly in and of itself created the single reason for the rise of QWERTY is quite flawed. It was the brilliant idea to train the typist to memorize a particular keyboard layout that fundamentally made QWERTY a standard for better or worse.
I have used this example over the last few decades as a deep example to many founders of start-ups. If Sholes returned to see his invention in use at this scale I am certain it would fascinate him and perhaps give him pause and a chuckle.
The cause and effect the relatively new concept of typing has had on society is of course mostly positive. We get to interact with computers using this technologically ancient method. However, I see this as a stop over point to what I call the Voice First revolution [12].
The human thinking and communication work product is speech. We talk in words and sentences not serially in letters. This is the byproduct of millions of years of evolution and perhaps , years of vocalizations. Humans have been talking for a very long time.
You are talking to yourself as you read this as well as I am talking to myself as I try to type this this part I did not dictate using Siri. The only reason we did not talk to the typewriter or the early computers that copied the typewriters is because they obviously did not have the technology to understand us. And some may argue that talking to a computer has been around for a while and it is not very useful.
I would agree. There is much more to the Voice First revolution then simulating what we do when we type. I know this, long before evolution self selects humans for better typing abilities without impacting thinking functions, we will have long ago moved on to using our voice.
Giving us more power because of the machine? However, the use of the keyboard will not instantly disappear, nor did the bicycle. It will be supplanted by new technology.
The bicycle exists in the scooter and self driving car world. But it is a relic from the mechanical age. We will move from the mechanical age of of using our fingers and perhaps just our thumbs to filter our knowledge to the true software age of using our voice, it is how we are designed. Are we going to keep that layout going? But if not, how might a new design develop? Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword.
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As the original typewriters were mechanically slower than a reasonably quick typist the keys were arranged to slow the typist down. Hence the common letters, a, s and e are used by the third and fourth finger of the left hand. Columb Healy, Staining Lancs Because typists have been trained on Qwerty keyboards since the s and noone can be bothered retraining them. Sholes, came up with a layout that suoted the unwieldy mechanical instrument of the type. There is also a rumour that the word "typewriter" coule be typed quickly since all the letters were on one row.
Eoin C. The logic of the qwerty layout was based on letter usage in English rather than letter postion in the alphabet. Peter Brooke, Kinmuck Scotland The "qwerty" keyboard arrangement stems from mechanical typewriters. The keys are arranged to make fast typing difficult as old typewriters would easily jam.
Of course humans being adaptable sorts have learned to overcome this obstructionist system and now some folks type faster than they talk, or even think. R Kenig, London UK Because when typing in English don't know about other languages you use some characters such as vowels far more frequently than others such as Z or X , and the keyboard is designed to help you reach the most frequently used keys most easily.
However, to truly benefit from this you need to learn to touch type and stop looking at the keys and prodding away with one finger. Once you learn to touch type you will wonder how you managed before. Mary, Glasgow Scotland They are arranged randomly because manual typewriters tended to jam if the user typed too fast - therefore the arrangement was intended to slow early typists down.
Now, of course, we want to be able to typer faster faster faster, so why change what we're all used to? Julie F, London because fingers do not read from left to right miche, scotland The keys on a qwerty board were designed when typewriters were mechanically driven, secretaries at the time were apparently so efficient that the arms carrying the characters and attached to the keys often got entangled, requiring the ministrations of an expensive engineer.
The answer, put them where you least expect them! Fiona Bell, Nuneaton Warwickshire This is an easy one. On the end of the lever - called a type bar - would be a pair of reversed letters in relief.
I discovered that if I hit several keys at once, the type bars all flew up at the same time into the same spot. Fun for a nine-year-old boy, less so for a professional typist. Typing at 60 words per minute wpm - no stretch for a good typist - means five or six letters striking the same spot each second. At such a speed, the typist might need to be slowed down for the sake of the typewriter.
That is what qwerty supposedly did. Then again, if qwerty really was designed to be slow, how come the most popular pair of letters in English, T-H, are adjacent and right under the index fingers? The plot thickens. The father of the qwerty keyboard was Christopher Latham Sholes, a printer from Wisconsin who sold his first typewriter in to Porter's Telegraph College, Chicago. That bit's important. The qwerty layout was designed for the convenience of telegraph operators transcribing Morse code - that's why, for example, the Z is next to the S and the E, because Z and SE are indistinguishable in American Morse code.
The telegraph receiver would hover over those letters, waiting for context to make everything clear. So the qwerty keyboard wasn't designed to be slow. But it wasn't designed for the convenience of you and me, either. The simple answer is that qwerty won a battle for dominance in the s. Sholes' design was taken up by the gunsmiths E Remington and Sons.
It wasn't the only typewriter around - Sholes has been described as the "52nd man to invent the typewriter" - but the qwerty keyboard emerged victorious. The Remington company cannily provided qwerty typing courses, and when it merged with four major rivals in , they all adopted what became known as "the universal layout".
And this brief struggle for market dominance in s America determines the keyboard layout on today's iPads. Nobody then was thinking about our interests - but their actions control ours. And that's a shame, because more logical layouts exist: notably the Dvorak, designed by August Dvorak and patented in It favours the dominant hand left and right-hand layouts are available and puts the most-used keys together.
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