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Dvorak Layout Claimed Not Superior To QWERTY
Michael Pyne sends in an article published at Reason Online 13 years ago, dismantling the entrenched myth that the Dvorak keyboard layout is a superior technology to QWERTY. The odd thing is that this 13-year-old article recaps research (refereed and published in a respected economics journal) 19 years ago. While we have discussed Dvorak many times over the years, I don't believe we have dug into this convincing-sounding refutation of the Dvorak mythology. The article is in the context of arguing against the conventional wisdom of "first mover advantage" — that the first product to market gains a large entrenchment benefit, such as VHS vs. Beta, MS-DOS vs. anything, etc. It's very much a pro-markets piece.
If you're serious about typing at high speeds, you know better than to use a sequential keyboard, you go for chorded. A sequential keyboard is one where you type all letters in sequence, such as the common qwerty or dvorak. A chorded keyboard is parallel in the sense that you type whole syllables at the same time; it's kind of like playing the piano. Instead of typing s-y-l-l-a-b-l-e, you'd type syl-la-ble. Do that at speed and you're golden; you can get around three times the speed of ten-fingered qwerty once you're into the system and have it in muscle memory.
The sad truth is of course that that qwerty is here to stay since it has no barrier to entrance: you start with hunt and peck and take off from there. Chorded keyboards take conscious effort to master, but once you're trained on them, they're bliss.
Check out the Veyboard, by a Dutch company, it's one of the nicer chorded systems. (Doesn't lean heavy on abbrevs and cryptospeak like Stenotype.) http://www.veyboard.nl
I know that the Slashdot editing has a very low reputation around here but I was pretty interested to see how much work was done on this article writeup. You can see mine at the Firehose entry. The Slashdot editor even went to the trouble of looking up prior Dvorak-related articles (and taking the trouble to notice the article I submitted was 13 years old -- whoops)
I always read about how our QWERTY typewriters were designed to deliberately 'slow' you down. I even taught this to my classes of elementary and middle school students.
In my classes I tried to teach my young students (5th grade) to use the computer to enhance their regular school work. One day they came to class and told me that their homework was to find a sentence and count, how many a's, how many b's, etc. I delighted in teaching them to use a spreadsheet for this.
The next day my son came home from school and showed me the class totals. I was struck by an idea. I pulled out my Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing manual (in the days when they came with paper manuals) to compare the results of these 5th graders with the Dvorak keyboard. I was stunned, as they matched almost perfectly.
If young children without a bias come up with the same result, there is a rightness and a logic to it. Soon thereafter my son switched to Dvorak and after about a week was faster. He was even much faster another week later.
Soon thereafter, I used Mavis Beacon to learn the Dvorak keyboard while on a flight to Tokyo. I was typing fully in Dvorak by the end of that flight and never went back. Only rarely am I forced to type in QWERTY and on those occasions I have to look at the keys. I try to keep it out of my consciousness so as not to conflict with my use of Dvorak, and I have forgotten how to type fast in QWERTY.
The main benefit is that it feels so much better, as my fingers travel less. There is a lot less stress on my fingers. My fingers were starting to exhibit signs of pain and exhaustion when typing in QWERTY and that went away. Dvorak is much easier on the fingers.
OK a new size TV
Thats a myth, QWERTY was not there to slow the typist down, but to speed them up. Letters that would jam where places further apart, so less jamming and more speed as the result. As a result QWERTY is simply the solution to a problem that no longer exist.