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<DIV>In a message dated 10/20/2004 10:15:09 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
vaughn@sewardconsulting.com writes:</DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE
style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: blue 2px solid"><FONT
style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: transparent" face=Arial color=#000000 size=3>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.</FONT></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV>
<DIV></DIV>
<DIV>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.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Ah-ha... here we go:</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><A
href="http://home.earthlink.net/~dcrehr/whyqwert.html">http://home.earthlink.net/~dcrehr/whyqwert.html</A></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>-seth</DIV></FONT></BODY></HTML>