[Groop] Keyboarding...Dvorak?

[Vaughn Seward]

It is true that Sholes, the inventor of QWERTY, was trying to improve the 
speed of his original typewriter. My point was that his solution ended up 
arranging the keys so that the typists fingers had to travel farther giving 
the typebar an extra little bit of time to fall back into place before the 
next typebar sprang into action. The end result is an arrangement that 
forces your fingers to travel farther and do more work. Consequently it is 
slower and more awkward on modern equipment (I am not questioning Mr. 
Sholes motives).

Although an expert typist can do 100+ words per minute, the same typist 
with Dvorak can go even faster. The fastest typest in the world uses Dvorak 
and has been clocked at 212 WPM (she holds the Guiness Book of World Record 
for typing speed)!
http://sominfo.syr.edu/facstaff/dvorak/blackburn.html

My point though is that Dvorak is less stressful on your your fingers and 
wrists. If you are a two-finger typist or don't do a lot of typing this 
isn't an issue. But for someone that does a lot of typing (like me) it can 
make a difference.

~Vaughn

At 2004/10/20 08:23, you wrote:
>In a message dated 10/20/2004 10:15:09 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
>vaughn at sewardconsulting.com writes:
>The design of the early typewriters was such that they had trouble with 
>keys sticking at faster typing speeds. To get around this the keyboard was 
>deliberately laid out to slow typists down (and thus the QWERTY layout). 
>So today we are using a legacy keyboard design explicitly engineered to be 
>slow and awkward.
>
>The way I learned it, typwriters weren't deliberately laid out to slow 
>typists down, but makers discovered that some letters were used far more 
>frequently than others.  In an alphabetical set-up of the keyboard, some 
>of these commonly used letters happened to reside very near each other and 
>so, when typing, they would wind up meeting and catching.  The keyboard 
>was then designed to spread out the more commonly used letters so as to 
>help prevent them from sticking.
>
>Ah-ha... here we go:
>
><http://home.earthlink.net/~dcrehr/whyqwert.html>http://home.earthlink.net/~dcrehr/whyqwert.html
>
>
>-seth
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