Apparently the old story about QWERTY keyboards being designed to slow down typewriters to avoid jams is incorrect. It was actually designed that way for Morse code receivers and to avoid previous patents.
On the origin of the QWERTY keyboard
- Thread starter dada_dave
- Start date
Yoused
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I finally got my Aspen keyboard working on my mother's old Mac. I developed it some 20 years ago (looked at Dvorak, did not find it appealing) and trained myself on it, now QWERTY has become just the suck. One problem with QWERTY is having the Q and W right next to each other, so that you might go to close a window and end up quitting the app instead.
Interesting, thanks for posting. But regardless of the intent, it sure slowed me down.
How long did it take you to retrain your brain to use it and how did you decide on that sequence of keys when developing it?
Yoused
up
After about six months, I had myself retrained pretty well. I took Dvorak and QWERTY and kind of mashed them together, used it for a little while, swapped some keys around, used it some more, made more changes and got it right where I like it. One of the big things was pulling hyphen down to a more convenient spot, because it gets a lot of use in BASH commands.
Dvorak puts the "L" on the upper right pinky, which is not a good place for such a high frequency letter. And having all the vowels on the home row might sound good, but some consonants get as much use as the vowels. I focused on frequency, central fingers and left/right balance. Mainly, my fingers stretch a whole lot less than QWERTY demands.
IIRC the most frequently used letters in English text are, in order of frequency:
ETA OIN SHRDLU
Why do I have this factoid stuck in my head? Because I read that book "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" while I was in college and, among many other things, Hofstadter loved to talk about ETA OIN SHRDLU.
I should get a copy of that and read it again, it blew my mind when I was young but I suspect it might seem a little quaint now. Then again, how can you learn about Gödel incompleteness without being amazed? And humbled, it sure is a check on the ego of young STEM enthusiasts who think they're learning how to solve everything.
ETA OIN SHRDLU
Why do I have this factoid stuck in my head? Because I read that book "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" while I was in college and, among many other things, Hofstadter loved to talk about ETA OIN SHRDLU.
I should get a copy of that and read it again, it blew my mind when I was young but I suspect it might seem a little quaint now. Then again, how can you learn about Gödel incompleteness without being amazed? And humbled, it sure is a check on the ego of young STEM enthusiasts who think they're learning how to solve everything.
Our high school computer science teacher had us read it. It was indeed a mind bending book.
