On Monday 18 April 2016 12:01, Random832 wrote: > On Sun, Apr 17, 2016, at 21:39, Steven D'Aprano wrote: >> Oh no, it's the thread that wouldn't die! *wink* >> >> Actually, yes it is. At least, according to this website: >> >> http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/Dvorak/history.html > > I'd really rather see an instance of the claim not associated with > Dvorak marketing.
So would I, but this is hardly a Dvorak *marketing*. The author even points out that the famous case-study done by the US Navy was "biased, and at worst, fabricated". http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/Dvorak/ And he too repeats the canard that "Contrary to popular opinion" QWERTY wasn't designed to slow typists down. (Even though he later goes on to support the popular opinion.) You can also read the article in Reason magazine: http://reason.com/archives/1996/06/01/typing-errors You can skip the entire first page -- it is almost entirely a screed against government regulation and a defence of the all-mighty free-market. But the article goes through some fairly compelling evidence that Dvorak keyboards are barely more efficient that QWERTY, and that there was plenty of competition in type-writers in the late 1800s. I don't agree with the Reason article that they have disproven the conventional wisdom that QWERTY won the typewriter wars due to luck and path-dependence. The authors are (in my opinion) overly keen to dismiss path-dependence, for instance taking it as self-evidently true that the use of QWERTY in the US would have no influence over other countries' choice in key layout. But it does support the contention that, at the time, QWERTY was faster than the alternatives. Unfortunately, what it doesn't talk about is whether or not the alternate layouts had fewer jams. Wikipedia's article on QWERTY shows the various designs used by Sholes and Remington, leading to the modern layout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY One serious problem for discussion is that the QWERTY keyboard we use now is *not* the same as that designed by Sholes. For instance, one anomaly is that two very common digraphs, ER and RE, are right next to each other. But that's not how Sholes laid out the keys. On his keyboard, the top row was initially AEI.?Y then changed to QWE.TY. Failure to recognise this leads to errors like this blogger's claim that it is "wrong" that QWERTY was designed to break apart common digraphs: http://yasuoka.blogspot.com.au/2006/08/sholes-discovered-that-many- english.html Even on a modern keyboard, out of the ten most common digraphs: th he in er an re nd at on nt only er/re use consecutive keys, and five out of the ten use alternate hands. Move the R back to its original position, and there are none with consecutive keys and seven with alternate hands. > It only holds up as an obvious inference from the > nature of how typing works if we assume *one*-finger hunt-and-peck > rather than two-finger. I don't agree, but neither can I prove it conclusively. > Your website describes two-finger as the method > that was being replaced by the 1878 introduction of ten-finger typing. > >> The QWERTY layout was first sold in 1873 while the first known use of >> ten-fingered typing was in 1878, and touch-typing wasn't invented for >> another decade, in 1888. > > Two-finger hunt-and-peck is sufficient for placing keys on opposite > hands to speed typing up rather than slow it down. Correct, once you take into account jamming. That's the whole point of separating the keys. But consider common letter combinations that can be typed by the one hand: QWERTY has a significant number of quite long words that can be typed with one hand, the *left* hand. That's actually quite harmful for both typing speed and accuracy. Anyway, you seem to have ignored (or perhaps you just have nothing to say) my comments about the home keys. It seems clear to me that even with two- finger typing, a layout that puts ETAOIN on the home keys, such as the Blickensderfer typewriter, would minimize the distance travelled by the fingers and improve typing speed -- but only so long as the problem of jamming was solved. Interestingly, Wikipedia makes it clear that in the 19th century, the problem of jamming arms was already solved by doing away with the arms and using a wheel or a ball. -- Steve -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
