QWERTY was not designed to intentionally slow typists down (was: Unicode normalisation [was Re: [beginner] What's wrong?])

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sat, 9 Apr 2016 10:43 am, Ben Finney wrote:

> Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed at ix.netcom.com> writes:
> 
>> [The QWERTY keyboard layout] was a sane design -- for early mechanical
>> typewrites. It fulfills its goal of slowing down a typist to reduce
>> jamming print-heads at the platen.
> 
> This is an often-repeated myth, with citations back as far as the 1970s.
> It is false.
> 
> The design is intended to reduce jamming the print heads together, but
> the goal of this is not to reduce speed, but to enable *fast* typing.

And how did it enable fast typing? By *slowing down the typist*, and thus
having fewer jams.

Honestly, I have the greatest respect for the Straight Dope, but this is one
of those times when they miss the forest for the trees. The conventional
wisdom about typewriters isn't wrong -- or at least there's no evidence
that it's wrong.

As far as I can, *every single* argument against the conventional wisdom
comes down to an argument that it is ridiculous or silly that anyone might
have wanted to slow typing down. For example, Wikipedia links to this page:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fact-of-fiction-the-legend-of-the-qwerty-keyboard-49863249/?no-ist

which quotes researchers:

“The speed of Morse receiver should be equal to the Morse sender, of course.
If Sholes really arranged the keyboard to slow down the operator, the
operator became unable to catch up the Morse sender. We don’t believe that
Sholes had such a nonsense intention during his development of
Type-Writer.”

This is merely argument from personal incredibility:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity

and is trivially answerable: how well do you think the receiver can keep up
with the sender if they have to stop every few dozen keystrokes to unjam
the typewriter?

Wikipedia states:

"Contrary to popular belief, the QWERTY layout was not designed to slow the
typist down,[3]"

with the footnote [3] linking to

http://www.maltron.com/media/lillian_kditee_001.pdf

which clearly and prominently states in the THIRD paragraph:

"It has been said of the Sholes letter layout [QWERTY] this it would
probably have been chosen if the objective was to find the least
efficient -- in terms of learning time and speed achievable -- and the most
error producing character arrangement. This is not surprising when one
considers that a team of people spent one year developing this layout so
that it should provide THE GREATEST INHIBITION TO FAST KEYING. [Emphasis
added.] This was no Machiavellian plot, but necessary because the mechanism
of the early typewriters required slow operation."

This is the power of the "slowing typists down is a myth" meme: same
Wikipedia contributor takes an article which *clearly and obviously*
repeats the conventional narrative that QWERTY was designed to decrease the
number of key presses per second, and uses that to defend the counter-myth
that QWERTY wasn't designed to decrease the number of key presses per
second!

These are the historical facts:

- early typewriters had varying layouts, some of which allow much more rapid
keying than QWERTY;

- early typewriters were prone to frequent and difficult jamming;

- Sholes spend significant time developing a layout which reduced the number
of jams by intentionally moving frequently typed characters far apart,
which has the effect of slowing down the rate at which the typist can hit
keys;

- which results in greater typing speed do to a reduced number of jams.

In other words the conventional story.

Jams have such a massively negative effect on typing speed that reducing the
number of jams gives you a *huge* win on overall speed even if the rate of
keying is significantly lower. At first glance, it may seem paradoxical,
but it's not. Which is faster?

- typing at a steady speed of (lets say) 100 words per minute;

- typing in bursts of (say) 200 wpm for a minute, followed by three minutes
of 0 wpm.

The second case averages half the speed of the first, even though the typist
is hitting keys at a faster rate. This shouldn't be surprising to any car
driver who has raced from one red light to the next, only to be caught up
and even overtaken by somebody driving at a more sedate speed who caught
nothing but green lights. Or to anyone who has heard the story of the
Tortoise and the Hare.

The moral of QWERTY is "less haste, more speed".

The myth of the "QWERTY myth" is based on the idea that people are unable to
distinguish between peak speed and average speed. But ironically, in my
experience, it's only those repeating the myth who seem confused by that
difference (as in the quote from the Smithsonian above). Most people don't
need the conventional narrative explained:

"Speed up typing by slowing the typist down? Yeah, that makes sense. When I
try to do things in a rush, I make more mistakes and end up taking longer
than I otherwise would have. This is exactly the same sort of principle."

while others, like our dear Cecil from the Straight Dope, wrongly imagine
that ordinary folks cannot understand this rather simple concept, and
therefore must believe something which nobody has every said:

"QWERTY was designed to make typing slower."

Well, maybe Dvorak proponents, but they have an ulterior motive to
misrepresent the situation.





-- 
Steven