jimmygo.com

I was recently reading a Slashdot article about how we are stuck with the x86 architecture because its been in use for so long. Everyone’s used to it… its what we have. Whatever.

Someone (J.R. Random actually) made a flippant comment that struck me as odd: “The x86 instruction set will be retired in the same year as the QWERTY keyboard layout.” This intrigued me. I had never put much thought into how or why our keyboards are laid out the way they are. I certainly never knew that there were alternative keyboard layouts.

It turns out that the QWERTY keyboard (so named because of the five letters on the top left side of the keyboard) was infact optimized for performance. Just not the sort of performance we would normally be looking for. Apparently the guy who originally designed the QWERTY layout (Christopher Sholes) designed it so that it would actually be hard to type quickly! He did this because he was a typewriter designer, and anything over about 20 words per minute sometimes caused his typewriter to jam. Rather than redesign his typewriter he laid the keys out so that it would be hard to type fast. He did so by spreading the most popular letters as far apart as he could - which slowed most people down enough that jamming wasn’t a problem. Brilliant!

Sholes’ typewriter had some revolutionary features for its time. Long story short, it was so successful that it become an unofficial standard. Government offices started buying them, schools popped up to teach secretaries how to use them, etc. Eventually typewriters evolved enough so that people could learn to actually go fast, and before you know it, everyone was used to this design that was originally intended to make typists type slowly.

40 years down the road August Dvorak saw a movie of someone typing and thought that the finger movements were really inefficient. He made his own keyboard that would allow for faster more efficient movements: the “Dvorak keyboard”. He put all of the vowels on the left side homerow and all the most common consonants in the top or middle row for the right hand.

The Dvorak keyboard is supposedly better in every typing category (more speed, easier to learn, less finger fatigue/injuries) except for one: prevalence. Everyone in the typing world was already learning on QWERTY keyboards. Almost everyone who has been exposed to Dvorak’s keyboard agrees it is superior to QWERTY, the only reason we stick with QWERTY is that it was here first.

Well… I have decided to give a go of switching to Dvorak. Anyone that is currently running XP, Linux or a MAC can just change the settings of their computer so that it is a Dvorak. Windows users can look here to see how.

According to this free speed test I can currently type around 65 wpm on a QWERTY.

I’m going to practice typing DVORAC for a few weeks and go back and try again. The comparison will be slightly skewed as I’ve been typing on a QWERTY for 15 years… but if Dvorak is really superior I shouldn’t have any trouble catching up to my QWERTY skills in just a few weeks.

Note: I got most of the above details regarding the development and popularization of the QWERTY from Jared Diamond’s “The Curse of Qwerty”, which is actually a really good read.