Keyboard Heritage

By Ashton Mills
12:39 Sep 25, 2008 | 3 Comments
Tags: keyboard | history

With QWERTY being designed to prevent jamming on mechanical lever typewriters, why do we continue using it today in the age of computers? To be sure it’s not the only option.

In 1936 August Dvorak patented the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard (DSK), which he designed to address the shortcomings of QWERTY, mainly typist fatigue. It wasn’t just a random re-ordering; Dvorak studied the physiology of hands and letter use frequencies in words to come up with his layout. Some of his guidelines include common letters on the home row (middle row, where fingers rest) to be easiest to type; least used letters on the bottom row as they are hardest to reach; letters should be typed by alternating hands; and that the right hand should do more typing as most people are right handed.

Apparently, a typist can type around 400 of the most common words in the English language without leaving the home row, a number which averages 100 with QWERTY. Indeed the home row letters comprise some 70 per cent of the work for Dvorak, whereas the home row on QWERTY manages just over 30 per cent.

So why isn’t everyone using Dvorak? Habit, and of course tradition.

This article appeared in the August, 2008 issue of Atomic.

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3 Comments

n00bz0r Sep 25, 2008 1:39 PM	I want a Dvorak keyboard now. Just to be geeky.
^Faldo^ Sep 25, 2008 2:02 PM	I tried Dvorak a few years ago and couldn't, even though I wanted to. It was a combination of losing too much speed through relearning, losing keyboard shortcuts and knowing how to spell words by finger movements under Qwerty. The best implementation of Dvorak was on Mac, because all keyboard shortcuts require the command key. There's an option for Dvorak-but-revert-to-qwerty when you press the command key, which maintains shortcut links. (Conceptually, the OS is designed so that everything you do is a command and thus requires the command key as a modifier. Even something pissy like pressing delete won't delete a file, but command + delete will issue the command to delete a file.) Even then, I couldn't use Dvorak. I work on too many unknown machines with Adobe Premiere, After Effects and other software that have keyboard bindings that I've become used to under Qwerty, and because I write for a living I can't afford to take a hit in speed while I unlearn Qwerty and relearn Dvorak.
bolt_krank Sep 25, 2008 3:42 PM	Nice article. I can still remember the days of my Tandy 1000EX, when the scroll lock key was indispensable.

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Atomic Magazine

Issue: 137 | June, 2012

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