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!"

Comments

For those who don't read articles...

[Thomas M Hughes]

Well, its slashdotted, so you're excused.

But BS = Buckling Spring.

Re:Curious about Dvorak?

[PacoTaco]

Dvorak superiority is probably a myth.

Teletype!

[pesc]

Hah!

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.

A Dvorak keyboard makes more sense now than before

[Sunnan]

Where qwerty spreads things out so that all fingers are used frequently, dvorak causes you to use half your fingers far more frequently than the others.

This is not true. The buttons on the home row are "aoeu id htns". All very common letters - and all on a finger of their own (except "id"). So all the fingers on both hands are used.

Also qwerty relies a lot on alternating hands.. this is shown to be much faster than using a single hand to type a word.

An analysis of almost any english text will show that qwerty alternates less between the hands than dvorak. Dvorak has all the vowels on the left hand, so you'll have to use it several times for almost every word.

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).

Re:The original IBM keyboards rule!

[CharlieG]

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