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

[Steven D'Aprano]

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