

 The Lies You've Been Told About the Origin of the QWERTY Keyboard - Atlas10
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/the-lies-youve-been-told-about-the-origin-of-the-qwerty-keyboard/275537/

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ZeroGravitas
Amusing juxtaposition:

"More recent research has debunked any claims that Dvorak is more efficient,
but it hardly matters. Even in 1930 it was already too late for a new system
to gain a foothold."

The text "recent research" points to the Reason article that very few people
seem to realise is written by free market fundamentalist economists and not
ergonomic historians. These economists believe that there is no such thing as
lock-in. According to their theories the market always chooses the best tech.
Which means any tech not chosen by the market must be worse than whatever
wins.

Yet he contradicts their dogma in the very next sentence after citing them,
with the common sense view that entrenched tech can be worse than the
alternatives if it gets there first.

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bitwize
The truth doesn't matter anymore. The meme that "QWERTY was designed to be
inefficient, caught on, and now we're stuck with it" has mythical emotive
power, much like "women were worshipped for their mysterious ability to give
birth, before agriculture gave us the patriarchy", so much so that Alan Kay
still uses "a QWERTY keyboard situation" to describe "network effects of
something designed to suck"; and layout hipsters will be touting the
superiority of their Dvořák layouts long after the time_t-pocalypse twenty-
five years hence.

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ZeroGravitas
If you read the paper the actual reasons they propose for qwerty are as
bizarre and anti-ergonomic as the arm jamming and "typewriter" demo theory.
Namely: putting z,c,e together to help with decoding Morse. Putting the
letters i and o near 8 to help type the years 1870 and 1871 faster (early
keyboards had no zero and one key), and (topically) switching a couple of
other letters to avoid patents, but still vaguely following the original idea
of a-m going right and then n-z going left on a piano style keyboard.

This paper completely supports the view that old decisions stick around long
after they are no longer relevant even if the exact details differ from the
standard version.

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floor
It's not about the layout of the keys when coding in perl it's how soft they
are for when you roll your face on it.

