The Story Behind the QWERTY Keyboard | Hacker News Reader

The Story Behind the QWERTY Keyboard

blogs.smithsonianmag.com

28 pointsmxfh13 comments

Serious question: does anybody know how English alphabet ordering originated? It seems that the order is completely arbitrary, but interestingly has never been changed because it works for teaching and is universally understood.

I think that parallels the development of the QWERTY keyboard system and really any universally-accepted protocol (electrical outlets, clockwise downward screwing, vertical gas pedal right of horizontal brake, etc.). Once something is established that is simple and works, it becomes widespread and indoctrinated into society, and it takes an improvement of not just huge gains, but monumental gains to change people's behavior.

I think a lot about how many designs we accept as completely evolved that may not necessarily be ideal but trade perfection for universal understanding which is apparently more valuable.

EDIT: This section annoys me:

There’s a somewhat related theory that credits Remington’s pre-merger business tactics with the popularization of QWERTY. Remington didn’t just produce typewriters, they also provided training courses – for a small fee, of course. Typists who learned on their proprietary system would have to stay loyal to the brand, so companies that wanted to hire trained typists had to stock their desks with Remington typewriters. It’s a system that’s still works today, as illustrated by the devout following Apple built through the ecosystem created by iTunes, the iTunes store, and the iPod.

That example makes no sense to me. I think Oracle, Microsoft, or SAP are a lot better examples. Hell, SAP makes more from training courses in a month than most companies make in ten years.

Submitted about 5 hours ago, discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5659241

That submission originally went to blogspam, as the top comment points out, and a curator must have changed the URL of the link.

It's not just the virtual key layout that's inefficient, the physical key layout is also terrible, such as X being to the right of S, or C being to the right of D, making them awkward to reach with the corresponding finger on the home row when touch typing.

What you want is a symmetrical key layout where the left side horizontally mirrors the right side of the keyboard, and also with less or no horizontal deltas between the rows for the right hand (M is too far right of the J on the standard keyboard). A symmetrical physical key layout is objectively better (if the physical layout for your right hand was ideal, the layout for the left hand should be the mirror image of that), and can be found for instance in the TypeMatrix, Kinesis Advantage, or Truly Ergonomic keyboards. Since switching to the TypeMatrix 2030 I found typing to be a much more pleasant experience (particularly in combination with the Colemak virtual layout). I just wish there was a laptop being sold with a proper physical key layout too, would make coding on one much more comfortable.

Here's an article that talks about why the standard keyboard sucks: http://loup-vaillant.fr/articles/better-keyboards

A couple of hours with the Truly Ergonomic keyboard taught me that my keyboarding technique, self-learned since the age of 5 or so, is a complete disaster. Over the next couple of weeks, I had to unlearn such things as hitting 'B' with my right index finger, 'C' with my left index finger, and 'P' with my right ring finger.

Once I unlearned the behaviors that I used to deal with staggered layouts and awkward modifier usage, I overcame my 20-year-old typing speed wall. My speed is faster even on staggered layouts, and the ergonomics aren't as much of a concern.

Previous post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5659241

Regardless of how many times the story has or hasn't been posted or discussed; it grinds my gears that we are still using the qwerty, after it was a shitty layout to accommodate a shitty typewriter design and for pitching purposes. Then the horrible layout made it's way, absent of any kind of rationale or relationship, into the computer keyboard, which didn't even have any typing mechanism. Now it has even been transferred into the PDA (can we just start calling PDAs what they are...which is not a phone) and tablets, which now don't even have physical keyboards. Sometimes it blows my mind how humans just drag stupid nonsense from the primitive past into the future.

What keeps you from switching to colemak or dvorak? It's not like you can't use a different, alternative keyboard layout.

Switch to Dvoraks. Android supports it. Also:

>Now it has even been transferred into the PDA (can we just start calling PDAs what they are...which is not a phone) and tablets

I'd reverse that statement, phones are still phones, but tablets are PDAs.

Words change their meaning over time. "Phone" used to mean "device wired into the wall used for spoken communication."

Now it means, "Pocket computer that's usually connected to the Internet."

What's wrong with that?

On physical keyboards Qwerty isn't very good, but it turns out that touch screen devices have different keyboard layout needs. Since autocorrect finds potential mistypes by looking at adjacent keys to the one tapped, clustering high frequency keys all together isn't a good idea. The two most popular alternative keyboard layouts (Colemak and Dvorak) do this clustering to try to minimize the distance your fingers need to travel.

Typing on a touch screen and on a physical keyboard are so different (at least for smaller devices like phones) that you can use an alternative layout on your computer and stick with Qwerty on your touch device.

Sure, qwerty sucks. But I don't think it's the limiting factor. I reckon that with any keyboard layout, a much more substantial improvement in typing ability will come from spending some quality time with a typing tutor program. The people I know who spent time switching to dvorak, it seems, never spent much time learning to type qwerty very well....

I used to type about 80 WPM with QWERTY, and I would peak at a hair under 100 when I was on a roll.

I switched to Colemak a few years ago, and I currently type around 90 WPM ordinarily, and can peak at about 120 when I'm concentrating.

I have no idea if it's just that I've naturally progressed, or if Colemak is naturally faster, but in any case, I was a competent typist before I switched, and have significantly improved since.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com