New Standard Keyboard

An anonymous reader writes "There are two keyboard standards today - QWERTY and DVORAK. QWERTY, the one we usually have, was used on the first commercially produced typewriter in 1873. Ironically, QWERTY was actually designed to slow down the typist to prevent jamming the keys, and we've been stuck with that layout since. New Standard Keyboards offers new "alphabetical" keyboard. This keyboard has just 53-keys (instead of 101) and offers user-friendly benefits and quick data entry."

Comments

Ironically, that story isn't true

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop perpetuating myths.

Dvorak made up that story as marketing for the keyboard design he hoped to profit from. And, could they have made that new keyboard any uglier?

Re:Ironically, that story isn't true

[Anonymous Coward]

Trogre could have all the energy and ambition in the world, and he STILL wouldn't find any studies showing a "clear advantage" to the Dvorak keyboard. That's because such studies do not exist, despite the urban legends to the contrary. The work of Liebowitz and Margolis, cited above, makes this abundantly clear. The two economists thoroughly researched the entire Dvorak saga, and discovered that all of the things people like Trogre have heard about the Dvorak keyboard simply are not true. Most, in fact, have their origins in propaganda from Dvorak himself. No serious objective tests of the two keyboards found any substantial difference between them.

Re:Ironically, that story isn't true

[orzetto]

No, it's just a half-truth.

I think that it is simply unclear how they projected it. It was the nineteenth century after all, and some weird ideas were followed: eg, you can type typewriter with just keys on the top row (I read this was intended, for what reasons I'm not sure). Probably it was some trial and error, and they came with an half-baked design.

Oh, the exercise to the reader, yes: here is a Guinness record.

Re:Ironically, that story isn't true

[Wavicle]

The work of Liebowitz and Margolis, cited above, makes this abundantly clear.

The study by Liebowitz and Margolis depend heavily on two assumptions:

1) Dvorak's studies were self-serving and therefore suspicious.
2) Strong's studies were well controlled.

The first is kind of hard to argue, as the studies were self-serving. However, Strong's studies were NOT well controlled.

Don't believe me? Try getting the original material of Strong's research to verify his claims. You can't. Know why? Strong destroyed the material. If Strong's studies were well controlled, why did he shred his research when people started asking about it?

So in "researching the entire Dvorak saga", the two economists failed to even mention that Strong's research, which they use as the fundamental support of their argument, may be seriously flawed. At the very least we cannot take it at face value since we cannot analyze the data ourselves. In fact, Strong was not objective at all, from the very beginning he intended to show that any speed up with Dvorak is sufficiently small that retraining the Navy's typists would be impractical. So why did these economists overlook this fact? Well, they were themselves trying to argue that the market always picks the best solution.

Keep this in mind when you think about window's dominance in the market, or any other product that rose to the top through whatever questionable means. The paper in which these two economists wrote about Dvorak not being better than Qwerty was actually a paper in which they were saying "The market always chooses the best option." The keyboards were just the whipping boy they chose to use.

So which serious objective tests between the two keyboards have there been?

favorite keyboard

[ch-chuck]

is this one

The QWERTY Rumor

[ewithrow]

From http://www.chicagologic.com/QWERTYrumor.htm --

A long-lived rumor is that typewriter inventor Christopher Sholes arranged the letters in the QWERTY layout to slow down the typist.

If this were true, he would have located popular letters such as "A" and "S" at the far corners of the keyboard and located unpopular letters like "Q", "Z", and "X" under your fingertips, right where you don't need them. Looking at the PC (QWERTY) keyboard shows us that, in fact, the opposite is true.

What really happened was Mr. Sholes varied from his original alphabetic layout* when he placed commonly used pairs of letters such as "sh", "ck", "th", "pr", etc. on alternating sides of the keyboard to reduce jamming of the typewriter's swing-arms.

This design change actually had the bonus effect of speeding up typing by letting the user alternate hands more often - think drum roll.

A 1953 U.S. General Services Administration study of the QWERTY keyboard and it's only serious challenger, the DVORAK keyboard, found no appreciable typing speed difference between the two keyboards. Fingers travel less distance on the DVORAK layout, but additional alternating-hand keystrokes speed up the QWERTY layout. The result - a draw.

The fact is, QWERTY works and it works quite well.

* You can see remnants of Mr. Sholes original alphabetic layout in the QWERTY layout, namely the keys "FGHJKL".

Re: The QWERTY Rumor

[Jerf]

The fact is, QWERTY works and it works quite well.

Yes it does.

That would be its primary problem.

There is nothing like trying to get people out of a local opitma, even if it is sending them towards disaster. It's like trying to quit smoking; you know it will lead to a better life, but the current cost of a cigarette is so minimal, and the current pleasure of it so high.

QWERTY won't kill your hand in ten minutes or ten days. More like ten years. For some people, maybe even never. But for others, much sooner. I for one would prefer to never get RSI, and I decided after I experienced what turned out to be a false alarm that I never wanted to experience the real thing. Unfortunately, no science has been done in this domain to my knowledge so we are on our own with anecdotes. I note, however, that while I have heard many "I switched from QWERTY to DVORAK and my pain got better" stories, I have never heard an "I switched to DVORAK and my pain got worse until I went back to QWERTY". (People with that story are invited to comment and tell it, please!)

DVORAK probably isn't an answer to all the problems, but it helps a lot. You really do move your hands a lot less. As a secondary result, you will also find yourself actually touchtyping; all my life my hands were always wandering with QWERTY, now they don't, because they don't have to; wandering hands always "wander" into sub-optimal positions, which if you think about it ought to be a characteristic of a properly designed keyboard layout.

It's also about the only ergonomic thing you can do to a laptop.

For most of us non-competitive typer types, i.e., probably all but maybe one person reading this post, speed isn't a reason to move to Dvorak. But comfort is. This is so much nicer; the gain-per-minute is small, but I still plan to put a lot more minutes in front of a keyboard.

Origins of the new keyboard

[Indy Media Watch]

The new keyboard layout was designed such that computer salesmen of poor typing skills could type TUBGIRL with one hand, all along the same row of letters.

Unfortunately this did not stop the keys getting sticky.

spacebar

[ArmorFiend]

Where's the spacebar? Dude, if I can't hit the spacebar reliably with my FOREHEAD, then I'm not interested!

Re:Horrible, just horrible

[quacking duck]

But for some unfathomable reason the AT keyboard standard has transposed the top and bottom rows...

Unfathomable? Take one look at a calculator and it instantly becomes obvious. I can't say for certain since it predates my time, but I'll bet tape calculators used by accountants existed for some time before the numeric keypad was standard on keyboards.

Once that happened, it was far more logical to model the keypad after the calculator pad, since you're more likely to be punching in numbers in a spreadsheet, than punching in phone numbers into the computer.

Re:wrong

[EnderWigginsXenocide]

I beg to differ, ever try using shortcuts on anything other than a QWERTY? A BIG problem with switching to Dvorak is most common keyboard shortcuts aren't convenient. Imagine stretching your fingers over the keyboard to do a Ctrl-C Ctrl-V (or Cmd-C Cmd-V for those folks using MACs). Most shortcuts are not remapable and were coded with QWERTY in mind. They would not make sense on a keyboard layout that is radically different from QWERTY.

Re:wrong

[Gob Blesh It]

If you pick the Dvorak keyboard layout on Mac OS X, there's an option to preserve QWERTY keyboard shortcuts. Basically the effect is as if your Mac temporarily switched back to QWERTY for as long as you hold down the Command key.

(BTW, it's called a "Mac.")

Re:wrong

[ari_j]

And quadruple-bucky-shift-left-foot-cokebottle is the shortcut that does a cvs download of the Hurd, finishes the unfinished parts, and prepares it for release.

Some friends and I were actually going to make a footboard once, not that long ago, to move all the modifier keys to the floor. We figure that, if a church organist can play scales with her feet, we could speed up our typing significantly by never having to use two finger simultaneously by way of our feet doing that part of the job.

Re:wrong

[jonadab]

The problem with Dvorak is that it makes the same mistakes as QWERTY.

Fundamentally, how you arrange the letters -- assuming you use some logical
arrangement that makes a bit of sense -- is not the only thing that matters.
QWERTY (in order to keep typewriters from jamming) arranges them so that it's
statistically less likely for adjascent letters to occur on the same finger
and more likely for them to occur on opposite hands. This does speed up
typing somewhat over, say, an alphabetical layout (once you are comfortably
familiar with the layout you are using, of course). Dvorak instead goes out
of its way to put the letters that are most frequently used in English on
the keys that are easiest to hit. This too speeds up typing somewhat over
an alphabetical layout.

But they both have serious flaws, and it's not in how they lay out the letters.
It's in how they handle the other keys, which they do virtually the same way.
The numbers across the top are okay, and the spacebar is okay -- well, the
spacebar would be okay if it didn't waste one whole thumb. The thumb is
unique among the hand's fingers in that it can easily operate independently
from the other fingers. This makes it ideal for the spacebar, because space
is statistically more likely than any other character to be typed right
before or right after any other character. However, the thumb is *also*
ideal for a bucky key, the most important being shift, for a similar reason:
you can hold a key down with the thumb, and all your other fingers can still
hit any key they could hit before. Try that with the shift key where it is
now: it doesn't work, which is the main reason we have two shift keys,
which is wasteful and makes the layout larger than it needs to be. A second
thumb bar for shift would be much more efficient, in terms of typing speed,
and as an added bonus it reduces by one the number of keys needed. *Plus*,
it substantially reduces the frequency with which you hyperextend your pinky.
If your pinkies hurt after a long bout of typing, this is the answer.

There are other mistakes both layouts make. Ctrl is similarly poorly
positioned and should definitely be put where it's easier to hit. On the
other hand, the window key is in a bad place. It's effect is much more
drastic than ctrl, in that it takes keyboard focus completely away from the
application or window that had it and thoroughly disrupts whatever was being
done, so it should be out of the way more. Where the traditional layouts
have put it, it gets hit mostly by mistake and becomes an annoyance -- quite
needlessly, because there are plenty of out of the way places where it could
be put such that it would not be hit by mistake while the user is typing.
Right next to Print Screen, for example, would be a great place for it.

I could go on and on, but basically it comes down to this: QWERTY and Dvorak
both took great care when arranging the letters, and it shows: they're both
pretty decent arrangements for that (for different reasons). But they appear
to have put no thought whatsoever into the arrangment of the other keys
(except the spacebar), and that shows too: the arrangement of the other
keys *sucks* on these layouts. That is where the next round of improvements
needs to be made.

I'd start by putting shift and ctrl below the spacebar, where they can be
hit or held with the left and right thumb, respectively, with no impact on
where the other fingers can be. (This makes *one* combination hard --
Shift-Ctrl-Space -- but that's a rather unusual combination, and it makes
every other shift and ctrl combination much faster and easier. Care would
have to be taken so that normal hitting of the spacebar with either thumb
would not hit these keys by mistake, but that's easily possible if a gap
the size of a single key is left between them and the spacebar.) Then I'd
proceed by putting as much thought into the placement of every other key
as was put into the placement of the letters.