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A Selective History Of The Keyboard
Anonymous Gimp writes "Today's keyboards aren't what they used to be, no sir! Back in my day, we had our BS technology; our keyboards had chassis which allowed 'em to be thrown off a 3-story building and still work - barely dented. Yes those were the days. Now we've got these newfangled Wireless Ergonomic E-Mail button membrane keyboards. To heck with them, I say!"
Hear, hear! These clicky-clacky keyboards are great for dancing one's fingers across the keys with a minimum of force while still getting great tactile and audible feedback that yes, the keys you think you hit, really were hit. Nothing quite like them for "sureness" of typing.
(Do I use one now? No, I don't have one, but if I tripped over one in good condition, I'd probably buy it. By the way, barc0001, why did you get an AT in 1992? They were quite old by then...)
Well, its slashdotted, so you're excused.
But BS = Buckling Spring.
Dvorak superiority is probably a myth.
Are you kidding me? Microsoft uses whats known as "foam keyswitches" in their Natural Elite keyboards. Do a little research on keyboard technology and you will find that foam keyswitches are the cheapest, crapiest, most error prone type of keyswitches! Foam keyswitches don't last long, so plan on buying a new keyboard every few years. Foam keyswitches are very sensitive to moisture. Get them even the slightest bit wet, and you can forget it. Don't even get me started on the poor tactile feedback, the keystroke "bounce" errors, and the keystroke "sticking" and unrecognized keystroke errors... all of which occur with foam keyswitches.
Doing a little more research on the technologies and you will see why Microsoft uses foam keyswitches. Its not because they are quiet because a better more durable keyswitch technology with better tactile feedback exists: rubber dome keyswitches. No, Microsoft uses foam keyswitches in their keyboards because they are the cheapest. It saves them money because the average user doesn't know a damn thing about computers. Buzz words like CPU frequency numbers, RAM capacity numbers, and harddrive sizes are about the only specs that the average computer user looks for when buying a PC. Keyboards? Keyboard technology? Nah, they won't know any better, just give them foam keyswitches.
Any writer, programmer, or gamer should definitely keep away from foam keyswitch based keyboards. If you want a quiet keyboard, get a rubber dome keyswitch based keyboard. If you want THE best keyboard money can buy, minus loud typing noise, then go with a buckling spring capacitive switch keyboard.
Microsoft's mice are another topic in and of itself. Lets just say that compared to Microsoft's keyboards, their mice are pieces of gold! I mean, you can't get worse than a foam keyswitch based keyboard.
Listen kids, back in MY days, we used teletypes. Those keyboards were not for the weak. You had to hammer down the keys. And when one key was down, the other were mechanically locked and could not be pressed. You would hurt your fingers if you tried to hammer two keys at once.
The wonder of the teletype! No electronics. It was all mechanics. Imagine that! And they also had a paper tape reader/puncher which was handy to save your programs if your 100K disk allowance was used up.
)9TSS
My own review of the IBM 42H1292 and related 'boards is here, in case anybody cares.
There have been a number of posts complaining about how they have a new keyboard and it doesn't work in Linux. Well, though the Keyboard HOWTO doesn't mention it, these new keyboards work without modification to the standard X setup. That is to say, when you press an "internet" key, the X server recognizes this and recieves the scancode. All you have to do is map that scancode to a useful key, and presto, you have a functional internet keyboard.
Step by Step:The thing with qwerty that bothers me the most is that it requires my fingers to dance over the keyboard all spidery, while dvorak only forces me to move my fingers once or twice per word. I worked as a translator one summer, typing all day long. After a while, my finger began aching. That's when I seriously began thinking of switching.
Look: some economic students want to badmouth dvorak and promote qwerty for some rather silly reasons having to do with economic theory. I don't care about that.
I've used qwerty for twelve years before I switched to dvorak. Now I use both (nothing but dvorak on my own computer, though). The switch wasn't that easy, but it was worth it. It took me a few days to learn it properly. (One of my friends learned it in one evening, though - she wrote freakishly fast almost right away.)
More and more people are hearing of dvorak from the internet or their friends, and some of them switch. I know several people IRL (living in my town) who uses dvorak. In the typewriter age, switching to dvorak is a difficult and expensive task. In the computer age, switching is a manner of typing "setxkbmap dvorak" in the nearest xterm. (Have an image of the new keyboard layout on your screen, and look at it instead of at the keys. Keep the fingers on the home row. If you like it (it takes about a month to be good, though), you can mod your keyboard or get a special one.)
Dvorak isn't the be-all and end-all of keyboards, but I think it's an improvement on qwerty, just as qwerty was an improvement on the abcde-style layouts before it.
Dvorak won't miraculously cure your RSI (although it did help against my finger-aches) or make you become the fastest typist in the world (although the fastest typist in the world did use dvorak).
A. The loads on the right and left hands are equalized.
B. The load on the home (middle) row is maximized.
C. The frequency of alternating hand sequences is maximized and the frequency of same-finger typing is minimized.
If you look at QWERTY, you'll see that A is not satisfied very well at all - many of the most commonly used letters such as A,S,D,F,E,R,T and C are in the left hand. (The article actually states that QWERTY fails at this - 57% to 43% balance between hands.) Condition B is certainly not satisfied either - look at the preponderance of vowels and common letters in the top row. The last condition is the only one that QWERTY comes close to satisfying, but even then try typing words like "exaggerated" or "monopoly" (thanks to Jared Diamond and his April 1997 Discover Magazine article). Dvorak's layout is, in fact, optimized for all three of these conditions, using careful analysis of letter frequency, finger movement, and letter combinations. Note the presence of all the vowels on the home row, and common consonants like "snthd" on the home row of the right hand. This makes it highly likely that after the typist uses a vowel he will be switching to the opposite hand (likely the home row) to type the next letter.
What I'm getting at is that Dvorak's advantage may be more in hand/wrist comfort than anything else. I'll admit that claims of increased speed using Dvorak are probably not persuasive enough to make the argument for superiority. The article's strongest point is showing that typing speed varies little as a function of the layout of the keys. I'm willing to buy that anyone can type about as fast on any layout using the modern "shift" style keyboard. But speed isn't the only consideration. I haven't read or heard about many studies making the claim for reduced RSI while using Dvorak, but I'd guess that it's true. Anyone who's used the layout can confirm that typing on it has a flow and continuity that QWERTY cannot match - every time I'm forced to use a QWERTY keyboard I'm struck by how much my fingers are stretching all around to find the letters (and yes, I can still touch-typed in QWERTY after a minute or two of warm-up and finger-conversion - it's kind of like being keyboard bilingual). With Dvorak typing is just more natural feeling, like a ball rolling down a smooth hill. QWERTY is like rolling that same ball down a flight of steps. And if you gain a little extra typing speed out of it, all the better! (For what it's worth, the world typing speed record has been held by Dvorak typists for many years now.)
This is not some evangelical manifesto urging everyone to change layouts - but if you do make the switch, I promise you won't be disappointed. Both Windows and Mac have built-in Dvorak capability, and switching between the two is just a simple key combination. I've found that Mac is a bit more cooperative in this regard, but Windows is passably good. It's easy to fall into the trap of "well, if most of the world uses it, it must be the best thing out there." Doesn't hold true for Windows, does it?
Was that out loud?
May I humbly suggest an article of mine on that topic?
Regards
b.
--
"Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple."
And you can BUY the original PC keyboard to this day - NEW - I put one on every system I own
www.pckeyboard.com
They are the old IBM keyboard division!
Look for the 104 key, buckling spring keyboard - they call it the "Customizer"
If you want a keyboard that can be customized for Linux, look at their 104 key model
Standard disclaimer - no relation to them except a happy customer
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso