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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.
Kdawson.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
I think the mori important argument was that Sony censored what could be produced on beta, like porn. Sony didn't understand that 1) adult industry as a whole are always early adopters and 2) make up a strong majority of the movie industry. Cut them out from the beginning, and you are doomed.
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
Back in high school, I once reprogrammed a TRS-80 to the Dvorak layout, and taught myself to type on it over several weeks. It took a while to override pre-existing patterns.
The weird thing was, my hands felt like they were moving like sludge, but the letters were flying across the screen. It's a different ratio of smoke to fire. I never became faster on this layout, but could type about the same speed with less mechanical effort. I've been typing for so long, a large portion of my typing mistakes are whole word substitutions, when my spelling system doesn't keep up with my fingers. I don't regard my fingers as the limiting factor.
Since we're kicking baseless fables around the barn, how about the old canard RISC vs CISC, one of the original founding members of the Steve Jobs reality distortion consortium?
Quite simply, it's never held up. To begin with, RISC went much too far the other direction. The happy medium is somewhere closer to Thumb-2. Meanwhile the much predicted demise of x86 never came to pass. People usually pass this off with the Intel process prowess excuse, but the fact of the matter is that the complexity of the instruction didn't matter nearly so much as purported. Aspects of the instruction set that were liabilities during one architectural phase would become an asset in a subsequent architectural phase (e.g. read-modify-write instructions were later exploited to alleviate memory ordering pressure).
At the end of the day, the outcome is strikingly similar to my experience with Dvorak so many years ago: x86 runs just as fast as any RISC design, but it does so producing a lot more heat (huge amounts of churn in the instruction decode and in-flight score-boarding stages compared to RISC).
Another point no one ever mentions, is that QWERTY on a modern keyboard requires far less finger power than Dvorak on an old mechanical keyboard. I learned on an Underwood which required a pinky-finger pole vault to lift the carriage for an upper case letter. If I hit the shift key at the wrong angle (as a seventh grader) my pinky would buckle.
Hand skills at the desktop have evolved every bit as much, but we're kind of blind to it. Suppose there was a database of keyboard key stream intercepts categorized by year, dating back to the 1970s. If you were given a random sample of 100 contiguous keystrokes, how hard do you think it would be to guess the era?
I suspect my email keyboarding has remained the most consistent over the past 15 years, but even there, I bet there have been incremental changes in sentence structure and punctuation. I used to use the semicolon every page or so. These days, no one has time for a sentence in two acts with a curtain call in the middle.
If you think about it, even the mental construct of "the keyboard" as a rate determining factor is pretty old school. Back in the day, made a nice headline for Omni or Popular Mechanics along with the inevitable flying cars.