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Comment by erwald | Hacker News Reader

the very next sentence reads: "This idea is apparently false."

It does, but the article is pretty cagey in its retraction (including following up with the comment "Though on the other hand, jamming is really bad for typing speed!").

The author seems to me to at least partly still believe its true, merely acknowledging that it's a difficult position to maintain.

i am the author and i didn't mean to be wishy-washy about it. i read several of the papers involved and think it's more likely than not that qwerty was designed for fast typing, or at least not designed to type slowly. but i wouldn't say it's a done deal -- the paper i cited gives the most convincing argument, imo, but it didn't move me up to 100% confidence or anything. i didn't want to give the appearance of being too certain, because i'm not.

QWERTY was designed for enabling fast typing by avoiding typebar jams. See http://widespacer.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-hidden-secrets-of...

Ah, my mistake I'm sorry. Thank you for clarifying your thoughts.

no need to apologise :)

The confusion in many articles on the subject is because both the myth and the truth argue that QWERTY was designed to prevent hammer jams. The reason this confuses people is because anecdotally many people find QWERTY slower to find keys ergo many laymans assume QWERTY was designed to slow typing down to avoid jams (in fairness, it's not an unreasonable piece of logical deduction even if it's not technically accurate).

The reality was that typists were trained to type on QWERTY so they weren't slow typing on it. What QWERTY was designed to do was move common follow on characters further away from each other so the hammers jammed less often thus allowing trained typists to type faster than they could have on an alphabetized layout.

Given that the person you are replying to is the author, I'm guessing he probably does not "partly still believe it's true." I'm going to bang on the "give people generous readings" drum here, too: "Jamming is really bad for typing speed" is not "pretty cagey," it's "a humorous comment." (Also, you know, technically correct.)

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