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Qwerty Continuity
...The standard that was invented in 1872 is known worldwide as QWERTY after the first six letters of the top line of letter keys. The American naturalist Stephen Jay Gould relates that the characters on the QWERTY were deliberately set to be inconvenient, thus ensuring slower typing speeds.
The reason was simple. Typists using the earliest mechanical typewriters could reach such high speeds that the keys were frequently jamming. Subsequently, as Gould puts it, by some strange 'technological continuity law', the QWERTY survived into the age of electronic despite the fact that the jamming problem was no longer relevant.
All recent attempts to create a mass market for more efficient, for example the Dvorak, on which typists can achieve touch typing speeds about 40 per cent faster than on QWERTY, were blocked. ...
...The standard that was invented in 1872 is known worldwide as QWERTY after the first six letters of the top line of letter keys. The American naturalist Stephen Jay Gould relates that the characters on the QWERTY were deliberately set to be inconvenient, thus ensuring slower typing speeds.
The reason was simple. Typists using the earliest mechanical typewriters could reach such high speeds that the keys were frequently jamming. Subsequently, as Gould puts it, by some strange 'technological continuity law', the QWERTY survived into the age of electronic despite the fact that the jamming problem was no longer relevant.
All recent attempts to create a mass market for more efficient, for example the Dvorak, on which typists can achieve touch typing speeds about 40 per cent faster than on QWERTY, were blocked. ...
