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<font size=3>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).<br><br>
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)!<br>
<a href="http://sominfo.syr.edu/facstaff/dvorak/blackburn.html" eudora="autourl">http://sominfo.syr.edu/facstaff/dvorak/blackburn.html<br><br>
</a>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.<br><br>
~Vaughn<br><br>
At 2004/10/20 08:23, you wrote:<br>
</font><blockquote type=cite class=cite cite=""><font face="Courier New Baltic, Courier" size=2>In
a message dated 10/20/2004 10:15:09 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
vaughn@sewardconsulting.com writes:</font><font size=3> </font>
<dl>
<dd><font face="arial" 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><br><br>
</dl>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.<br>
<br>
Ah-ha... here we go:<br>
<br>
<a href="http://home.earthlink.net/~dcrehr/whyqwert.html">http://home.earthlink.net/~dcrehr/whyqwert.html</a><br>
<br>
<br>
-seth<br>
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