Non-Traditional Keyboard Reviews

A reader writes "MSNBC has posted a story about 3 weird new keyboards - the Keybowl, the DataHand, and the Half Keyboard. Pretty bizarre stuff." Both Rob and I played around with the one from Ergointerfaces who are releasing an updated version soon - and we had AskSlashdot on it a while ago - but what do you folks think?

Comments

sorry, these are all popular MYTHS...

[Preposterous Coward]

...or, some would argue in the case of the Dvorak keyboard, hoaxes. Business schools that are still using any of these examples are, unfortunately, promulgating misinformation. The "I use it becaue everybody else does" argument is based on a phenomenon known as "network effects" (i.e., as the network of users of a technology grows, the value of the technology typically grows on the order of n^2 rather than linearly with n, fax machines being the traditional example). The supposed first-mover-but-inferior-technology advantage is described as "path dependence".

Anyway, on to the fun part: Demolishing the myths. The Dvorak keyboard may indeed be more "logical" than QWERTY, but it doesn't seem anybody can actually cite any well-controlled, objective studies that demonstrate superior performance. Most of the early claims of its alleged superiority were provided by none other than the keyboard designer (and patent-holder -- no economic self-interest there!) August Dvorak himself.

Here is an article by two economists that rather thoroughly demolishes the claimed superiority of Dvorak. Discussing the results of one controlled comparison test:

In the first phase of Strong's experiment ten government typists were retrained on the Dvorak keyboard. It took well over twenty-five days of four-hour-a-day training for these typists to catch up to their old Qwerty speed. (Compare this to the claim David makes about the Navy study's results that the full retraining costs were recovered in ten days.) When the typists had finally caught up to their old speed Strong began the second phase of the experiment. The newly trained Dvorak typists continued training and a group of ten Qwerty typists began a parallel program to improve their skills. In this second phase the Dvorak typists progressed less quickly with further Dvorak training than did Qwerty typists training on Qwerty keyboards.

Strong's study does leave some questions unanswered. Because it uses experienced typists it cannot tell us whether beginning Dvorak typists could be trained more quickly than beginning Qwerty typists.

Of course, since all of us here (I assume) learned on Qwerty keyboards, that final caveat really doesn't matter.

And there's more from the same piece -- this time from someone who is strong Dvorak supporter:

He cites a 1973 study based on six typists at Western Electric where after 104 hours of training on DSK, typists were 2.6 percent faster than they had been on Qwerty. Similarly Yamada reports that in a 1978 study at Oregon State University after 100 hours of training typists were up to 97.6 percent of their old Qwerty speed.

As for the oft-cited VHS vs. Betamax debate, there are numerous problems with the argument that the inferior, but first-to-market technology won. First is that Betamax was actually first to market -- 1975 vs. 1977. Second is that, picture quality aside, VHS was superior to Betamax in one critical dimension that consumers valued: Recording time. The original Betamax format only allowed one hour recordings, vs. four hours for VHS. Thus VHS allowed recording of an entire film, or even an entire American football game, on one cassette. Ad copy made a big deal about this capability. Third is that it's not even clear that Betamax offered the alleged advantage in video quality: In four reviews in Consumer Reports, the Betamax was judged superior to VHS twice, VHS superior to Betamax once, and both equivalent once. Taken together, these factors gave VHS a decisive advantage.

I can't add anything to the Mac-Windows discussion that this audience won't have heard, but I think everyone recognizes that there were far more factors that led to the dominance of Wintel than the fact that it was simply first while Macs were technically better. Certainly lots of us here will remember how Apple used to command truly exorbitant prices for its systems, how it refused to license the OS to give people choices, how its systems lacked expandability, how DOS/Windows systems were compatible with existing software, how Apple abused developers while Microsoft showed them the love, how IBM and other PC manufacturers had strong relationships with brand specifiers in the businesses that were still buying most PCs at that time. Was the MacOS circa, say, 1986 technically superior to Windows at that time? Yeah, sure. But most people weren't buying an OS, they were buying an entire computer -- and looked at as a whole, the outcome of the Wintel-vs.-Mac battle is entirely reasonable without invoking the dubious path-dependence argument.

Before it gets started yet again...

[Reality Master 101]

The QWERTY keyboard was not designed for inefficiency, and the Dvorak keyboard is not clearly superior.

The myth of the Dvorak keyboard will probably outlive us all, but ya gotta keep trying.

--

Half Keyboard inventor reads /.

[Matias]

Hey Folks,

I'm the inventor of the Half Keyboard. Feel free to post any questions...

Edgar