QWERTY No Longer Justified [Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος]

In a recent conversation the notion that "the reason for the QWERTY keyboard no longers exists" came up. Today I saw a link to an alternative text-entry device (which I haven't looked at closely enough yet to have decided whether it's interesting to me or not), and that got me thinking about the history of the keyboard again.

In that earlier (private email) conversation, I opioned that despite the objective superiority of some other keyboards, the "switching cost" (am I using that term correctly?) outweighed the potential gains for many established Remington (QWERTY^[1]) layout users, and that effecting a transition to a more efficient tool on anything other than "a few quirky users here and there" basis (yes, I'm aware I've got friends using Dvorak keyboards and seeing the predicted performance boost -- I'm not knocking it on technical grounds, merely observing that it's not quite "mainstream" yet) would require introducing students to Dvorak before they'd already gotten used to Remington layout, and having their teachers already comfortable with it.

As for myself, I can't see mustering the patience for learning new habits simply for the speed benefits -- I didn't even finish working through the typing method book (borrowed from my mother) once I got to "fast enough that I'm no longer frustrated" speed. (FWIW, I'm pretty fast.) The RSI-related benefits, the "geek factor", curiosity, hackish appreciation for technical superiority ... these are all things which may someday convince me to finally get around to learning Dvorak, but I'm too complacent about my typing speed for speed alone to convince me to take the trouble. (Obviously, this is an explicitly personal observation, more about my attitude than about the tools.) But curiosity does pop up every so often, especially when my arms hurt (fibromyalgia, not an RSI, but even if the typing isn't the direct cause, "hurts to type" still means "hurts to type"), and especially when pondering chording keyboards and other less-standard text-input devices.

Some interesting devices would not work out well for me because of how often I type one-handed. (No, no, I don't mean it that way, you pervs! I mean lying on my side in bed, or standing up holding a keyboard or a whole laptop computer in one hand while typing with the other, or holding a phone or a pen in one hand and typing with the other, or a mouse and keyboard at the same time, or typing on two different computers at once. Or just feeling too ~~tired~~lazy to use both hands.) Some chording designs are one-handed designs, IIRC, and would thus make this even easier; other novel designs (as well as split-but-otherwise-conventional keyboards) would seriously get in the way of one-handed use.

(As I've said before, my desire regarding computer interfaces is to get as close as I can to "thinking into the machine". So I really ought to be exploring all these other input devices (not that I have any money to buy toys/tools with, but I should want to more). Someday I'll get around to trying out a few and maybe find one that fits my hands and my brain so well that I'll never want to switch back. For now, the noticeable obstacles are elsewhere in the interface. I'm not usually consciously aware of the mechanics of typing except for noticing a clicking noise while I think.)

But most of this is tangential to the thought that got me to fire up the text editor today. It was really the reminder of the comment that the problem the Remington keyboard solved no longer exists (for most practical purposes).

Me, I've got a good reason (other than "it was what was available/commonplace/taught at the time", which is an inescapable reason and a perfect excuse but not a good technical reason) for having gotten really accustomed to the Remington keyboard. Yes, my incentive for learning to touch-type was to be able to enter BASIC programs in one 45-minute class period, but my first exposure to a typewriter was an ancient ... ah, Underwood, I think, but I should probably ask Mom to make sure. And the typewriter I took with me to university and typed term papers on was a modern (for the time) portable mechanical typewriter. While my motive was the computer, what I practiced on at home was mechanical. I did have hammers jam and have to reach in to unstick them (that being the problem Remington solved -- not forcing people to type more slowly, but making jam-causing combinations less likely^[2] so they could type faster). I wasn't using a machine with a ball (IBM Selectric -- which feels so wrong to me that my typing speed falls off dramatically, even compared to my typewriter typing speed which is already much slower than my computer typing speed) or a cylinder (TeleType -- which has no rollover and forces a rate of about 10cps); I did use dot matrix (DECwriter II) sometimes for classes where the professors would accept crappy print with no descenders, and I used the ADDS dumb terminals to write ForTran and SPL and Pascal (and to edit stuff to print out on the DECwriter), but I spent a non-trivial amount of time using a typing machine that had hammers.

So I've got an excuse other than "my culture used it as the default" (sort of -- see footnote 2), but I wonder how many folks on my friendslist ever used a mechanical typewriter with hammers. Obviously I expect a majority of the people approximately my age or older to have done so (whether you learned to touch-type on them or not), but I wonder how many of my younger friends grew up in a house that had a mechanical relic in it or went out looking for one because of retro chic -- or wound up working in an office that still had a mechanical typewriter for envelopes or something.

So, finally getting to the point of this entry (guess I'd better make this a separate paragraph), How many of you have actually had to pry the hammers apart to make the keys go back up, getting ink on your fingers? .. And, uh, how many of you learned to touch type while you were still using that sort of typewriter?

[1] Which I recently had to reminded was commonly called "QWERTY" because I couldn't remember that it's properly "Remington" and I spend more time touching the keys than looking at them, so I wanted to refer to it by the keys on the home row. I wrote "ASDF" but knew it looked wrong even though I couldn't figure out why. When someone replied, "most people refer to that as QWERTY" I felt a tad foolish for having had a brain-fart on such a ubiquitous reference.

[2] Okay, it was one of several solutions to that problem, with the added bonus of making it easy for salesmen to type the brand name of the machine ("Type Writer") by putting all of those keys in the same row. And it wasn't even the best solution of its time, it just got the most traction during the critical period when such machines were catching on, so even though other layouts may have been better, typists wanted machines laid out in the way they were already familiar with, which brings us right back to my second paragraph, just 130 years earlier. While I'm at it, I should probably point out that the Dvorak layout isn't really new, though it was a latecomer to the keyboard layout fight: it harks back to 1932.

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Yo! I had to. Though I mostly managed not to get ink on me.

And I learned to type on a manual typewriter. (I took a typing class that wouldn't allow us to use electrical ones, even though by that point I was sporadically using a Vic 20 at home.)

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As a child, I learned to type on my grandmother's old mechanical Royal. She bought it in college in the '30s and carried it with her through her career (secretary assigned to first the Manhattan Project and then the Secretary of State, then newspaper writer, novelist and English teacher). She could type 150 WPM on a mechanical, and her finger control was so good that even at the end of her life, completely ravaged by multiple cerebral hemorrhages, she could bend the tips of her fingers independently of her other joints. My mother got it when she died, and so that's what I learned on. I'm nowhere near as good as that, but I wish I knew where her typewriter has gone.

How many of you have actually had to pry the hammers apart to make the keys go back up, getting ink on your fingers? ..

Oh yes, that would be me. To say nothing of the joy of those round rolling erasers with the brush on the end that tear through the paper when you're trying to erase the typo(s) created by said hammer jam. I was thrilled when my dad actually bought me an electric typewriter from Sears.

And, uh, how many of you learned to touch type while you were still using that sort of typewriter?

Again, me. My first typing class in 8th grade (1970-mumble) had manual typewriters. We didn't get to use electric ones until high school. It took me a long time to learn not to pound on the keys (creating whole groups of the same letter) since what I really typed on at home was my Grandpa's ancient Underwood that he used to type his sermons on. I asked my mother once if it came over on the Ark. She got a little thoughtful for awhile....

Oddly enough, despite having taught myself on a fully manual typewriter, I was one of the few people at my university who didn't pound the $%@* out of the keys on the computer terminals. Dunno whether that was because I was alternating between typewriter and TRS-80 in high school, or whether it was some early recognition that I could go faster if I took advantage of the responsiveness of the terminals' keys, but that wasn't a retraining-myself issue.

Come to think of it, it may be just that I had more patience when the HP3000 got slow than my classmates did, and they were poinding the keys in an instinctive attempt to be more emphatic at the machine or something.

The comment about the Ark amuses me.

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I don't touch type - I "play the keyboard" with whatever fingers are convenient, and still manage a reasonable speed. I do, however, remember using a manual typewriter - the type that didn't even have cartridge ribbons to swap out for corrections. I recall slipping these little 1"x2" pieces of correction paper in to correct mistakes and how they wouldn't always land in the right place regardless.

If you're not looking at the keys and not slowing down to think about how you're doing it, I'm inclined to call it "touch typing" even if it doesn't fit the exact, formally-taught, "correct" touch-typing method.

I know I'm not using the "right" fingers for some keys on the top and bottom rows. I only got almost halfway through the self-teaching book before I decided I was fast enough. (Actually, I thought I was "fast enough for now" and planned to go back and learn the rest properly later. I never got around to it, but my mother says I type faster than she does (on a computer at least) and estimates my speed on the 90+wpm range. I am, of course, significantly slower when I don't have a backspace key to immediately correct mistakes I feel my fingers make, so yeah, I'm slower on a typewriter.)

I thought the various typewriter correction technologies were wonderfully clever ... until I tried to use each of them and discovered none of them quite lived up to their billing. The correction paper seemed the least painful of them, but when it didn't line up ... argh.

My ultimate backup "computer" is a 1935 Royal portable typewriter, and I jealously hoard the ribbons for it whenever I can get them. And yes, I have pried the type hammers apart more often than I can tell you. On this old machine, the T double hits, the D double spaces and the E falls off -- and I still wrote most of a novel on it a few years ago.

I learned to type on a typewriter with hammers, because it was what my mother had in the house. When I took an actual typing course, it was on electric typewriters. I don't know if I have the hand strength now to type on an old manual typewriter.

Learned touch typing when I was 13.
Learned it on an IBM selectric.
Have indeed had ink on my fingers.

Learning DVORAK would be unlearning 20+ years of touch typing.
I can touch type in the DARK.

Yes, we no longer need the Remington Delay, but I do not see
a conversion any time soon.

"How many of you have actually had to pry the hammers apart to make the keys go back up, getting ink on your fingers?"

Yep, that would be me, too. It was very annoying to have to deal with, but a lot more easily fixable than a problem with my computer's keyboard, which required calling Dell and getting a tech sent out.

"And, uh, how many of you learned to touch type while you were still using that sort of typewriter?"

I learned on a manual, and used it all through high school and my first attempts at college. In fact, I used it until I got my first computer in 1990. Took me about a month to adjust to the differences (not having to change ribbons, being able to do cutting and pasting without having to physically cut and paste things, being able to correct errors without having to use white-out or retype the entire page, being able to justify margins easily, stuff like that), but once I did. I didn't look back.

That said, I agree that, especially at my age, learning a new keyboard layout would be annoying, and I am not sure how long it would take for me to regain what speed I have. Then again, I had issues when the company I went with went ergonomic and the position I had used for over four decades to type was suddenly all wrong (yes I did learn to type, kinds, when I was in single digits, agewise). I did try it, but after two weeks, I found that I was not comfortable, and stuck my keyboard on the desk and there it stayed no matter how many times I was told to use the typing tray they installed (which really did nothing more than hit my knees every time I tried to sit properly, or hit me in the stomach when I moved it into typing position).

But for those who are learning now and have the option, I think that the newer boards might be a good idea, depending on a number of variables.

For example, if they learn on a Dvoark* board, but every board they use once the enter the workforce is still Remington-based, they will run into problems. And, given my corporate experience, if a company does change to Dvorak*, will they be smart and pahse it in for their new folks, or will they do what Amex did with the ergonomics and just change everything at once and expect everyone to comply with the changes? Will it allow people to switch back if they find it doesn;t work (Amex did not give people that option)?

So, it seems to me that while the original problem that Remington-based keyboards may have gone the way of various species, there are still a majority of Remington-based users for whom switching to a newer technology might cause more problems than it will cure.

* Please note that I am using Dvorak as a stand-in for all the newer data entry technologies.

I had issues when the company I went with went ergonomic and the position I had used for over four decades to type was suddenly all wrong (yes I did learn to type, kinds, when I was in single digits, agewise). I did try it, but after two weeks, I found that I was not comfortable, and stuck my keyboard on the desk and there it stayed no matter how many times I was told to use the typing tray they installed (which really did nothing more than hit my knees every time I tried to sit properly, or hit me in the stomach when I moved it into typing position).

I have no idea who you are, but we are obviously related somehow :-)

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Me, on both counts. I learned to type in junior high school using manual typewriters, but I also "played" with one at home. And, yes, I had to unjam hammers and replace ribbons and all of that.

But I'm also old enough that I typed all of my undergraduate papers on a typewriter, albeit an electronic one with a daisy wheel.

I touch type and do not think about the keyboard much when I do. I'd hate to have to learn a new system.

And I type 40 wpm on my Tungsten-C with my thumbs...

Urk. Embarrassed to have forgotten about daisy wheels. (I did use daisy-wheel printers, but never a typewriter like that. I saw them but never used one.)

I'm not as fast with my thumb on my current Ericsson phone as I was on my first Ericsson (but at least the predictive word completion works better than Motorola's version). I'm really not sure how fast I am with my thumbs. Hmm.

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I learned how to type on an Underwood when I was a child and my mom and dad had one in the house. My grandmother would also let us play with the IBM selectics in her office. I am still particular to the sound of a selectric because of that. I have had ink on my fingers, unstuck typing jams, and discovered that the "eraser" really isn't. I used wite-out and used the little correction squares when I first started doing secretarial work in the late 1980's. I remember working on an ancient Wang in the bank that I worked in many years ago, and the day that they carted that sucker away to give us the nice desktop windows machines.

I learned QWERTY and despite there being a payoff down the line, I can't afford the efficiency loss that would happen if I decided to switch keyboards. I'm a secretary, and can touch-type in the dark :-)

I was absolutely fascinated by the hammer typewriter at mom's job when I was eight or nine. I didn't learn to touch-type until I was thirteen (a short class, I think it was Monday afternoons), and by then I had been using both typewriters and computers for quite some time. I _think_ we worked with electrical ones in that class, but I'm not certain.

Some interesting devices would not work out well for me because of how often I type one-handed. (No, no, I don't mean it that way, you pervs! I mean lying on my side in bed, or standing up holding a keyboard or a whole laptop computer in one hand while typing with the other, or holding a phone or a pen in one hand and typing with the other, or a mouse and keyboard at the same time, or typing on two different computers at once. Or just feeling too tiredlazy to use both hands.)

Me, I type one-handed every time I have a child on my lap, so I'm right there with you with the "NO, I AM NOT A PERV" thing!!

*cough* Er ... well, it's not so much that I'm not a perv, just that I'm not usually trying to type (other than hitting the page-down key) when I'm doing that.

I learned on a manual and that is also what we had to use in school. I hate them now and have absolutely no finger strength (and the manual return at this point would be the death of me :-)

I had to unjam the keys many, many times and did get inky. I had the "pencils" that were eraser at one tip and brush at the other end along with the circular eraser-that-wasn't/brush combo mentioned in an entry above.

I'd kill to be able to type at 50+wpm but I can't. The fibro started in my hands and makes them all sorts of weird. I also frequently do the one-handed thing whether is is a kid or the phone or holding the keyboard.....nothing anywhere fun enough to be pervy, unfortunately.

I loved Selectrics. I remember the first job I had where they were standard equipment (a law office.)
My original fibro-coping kb was a Casiowriter which had a tiny preview screen and a memory chip with a dictionary so I could catch more of my typos.

Did both. Had a heck of a time reducing my typing force when I finally started using electric / electronix keyboards on a regular basis.

Yep. I learned on a Smith-Corona. My folks made sure every one of their children learned how to type - supposedly so they could type out term papers.

I didn't type a single term paper - by that time the machine developed a hiccop; it would randomly put spaces in. I did try to bang out stories on it but just as I got in a groove it would either start adding spaces, or double letters, or just jam up.

Yeah, inky fingers.

But I liked the look and the feel of the type written page. For several years I owned daisy wheel printers to get that 'leter quality' look in my resumes.

-m

I learned to type in fifth grade on a typewriter with hammers. I remember prying hammers apart. I also remember the innovation of that correction tape where you could just over-strike with white powder instead of messing around with the liquid stuff. That seemed really, really innovative.

(Typing wasn't a standard offering that early in my school. For bizarre reasons I had the services of a special tutor for one class period a week. Most of her students were, err, at the other end of the spectrum in terms of academic achievement, so I was a challenge to her. She rolled with it, though, and we spent our time doing cool stuff that could be vaguely justified as useful learning -- and I got to skip one useless class a week to do it.)

I learned on a manual as a pre-teen, and still sometimes pound the keys too hard. BTDT on untangling the inky keys, eraser pencils with a brush on the other end, carbon paper, metal erasing shields, and razor blades to scrape off errors on mimeograph masters. I am a touch typist, and a fast one, but my accuracy's gone all to hell since I began using computers exclusively -- it's just too easy to fix a typo. That problem started with the second generation of IBM Selectrics, which I loved and still sorta miss. Once they developed the "self-correcting" typewriter, my accuracy was doomed.

Ooooh, I had one of those at one job (before they decided that secretaries should learn either word processing or computers -- I opted for the computer, btw). I miss my Selectric, although you still had to count spaces to justify text (manually justifying clauses on commercial leases was a real pain). But it was so much easier than all the correctype thingies (except, of course, when you were using carbons or carbon sets)!

Some people, such as myself, have no choice in the matter. I am physically incapable of using a QWERTY-layout keyboard for any significant amount of time. If I'm using an ergonomic keyboard (my kbd at home is the MS version 1, purchased in... oh, 1997? 1998? and still going strong), I last a little longer. If I remap to Dvorak, I can last a whole day.

I didn't switch for the performance gain. I switched because I had no choice. The fact that my typing speed went up significantly, I now have an amusingly effective "oh, just let me type.." deterrant, and most people can't tell what my password is just by watching me type (no matter the speed), these are just side benefits. ;)

When I was researching alternate keyboard layouts, I came across a number of fun-looking toys. The one that really made me drool was the DataHand line -- you could get an ergo chair with the "keyboard" attached to the end of the arms. You sit in the chair like normal, set your hands on the DataHand keypads, and wiggle your fingers to type. Talk about COOL! The price is the deterrant; a standard ergo keyboard is under $100, the cheap DataHand starts at $500 and I think that's the sale price. *pout*

One fun thing about Dvorak, btw, is that you can do left-handed or right-handed one-hand layouts. I haven't experimented with them because I prefer two-handed typing, but I suspect it's Uber Cool. And just because I like to be silly, the Dvorak layout is:

1234567890[] -- !@#$%^&*(){}
',.pyfgcrl/=\ -- "<>PYFGCRL?+|
aoeuidhtns- -- AOEUIDHTNS_
;qjkxbmwvz -- :QJKXBMWVZ

The A and the M didn't move. Everything else went walkabout. I think it's hilarious. :D

Regarding manual typewriters... one of my childhood toys was a really old typewrite. I have no clue how old, but I think I saw one just like it on an old, B&W original Leave It To Beaver episode. We were terrible to that poor typewriter, and took great glee in pushing down many keys at once to make it jam.

Regarding the history of Dvorak, I read somewhere when researching it that when computers started to go mainstream in the Gov't (roundabouts the late 30s, I believe), something Big Came Up that took precedence over switching to the more efficient layout. And that would be WWII. The program to switch office workers from QWERTY (Remington? Hm, much easier to type.) was scrapped because they needed those workers productive, not in training. Or at least, so I read. :)

(And I haven't read any other comments as I type this, I'm just blithely sharing in your geekery. :) )

Umf. Sorry if I messed up your Comments page, it seems to be formatting oddly at the bottom. :( I scanned the comments and feel the need to share...

I was initially touchtyping QWERTY at somewhere in the 70+ wpm range. When I did the switch, I taught myself the layout by switching at home, opening a Notepad window and entering the rows, then did the alphabet. It took 35 tries for me to be able to do it without error, looking at my 'template'. It then took two weeks of struggling at home until I was OK with the layout, a week to accept that I'd learned the layout well enough that I was getting confused, then another two weeks to get back up to approx 70+ wpm. I'm now faster.

*impish grin* And I touchtype Dvorak in the dark. I have to, I don't have a Dvorak keyboard -- I have my OS (Windows 2000, Windows XP) remap the keyboard for me. :) I can also touchtype QWERTY still, but occasionally get confused when I start to really get going; fortunately, I don't have to use QWERTY all that often. I've also been known to hunt-n-peck and single-hand type Dvorak; it's occasionally hard to remember where d and t are, but I'm getting better. :)

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I did. I had a mechancial typewriters growing up (a "portable" one), and the first typewriters I took (almsot completely useless) typing classes on in Junior High School were mechanical.

But I'll note that the key-jam problem that QWERTY was intended to justify was when the hammers were in a seriously inconvenient place in the really -early- typewriters, and it's likely that the ones that any of us used (where you could just reach in and unjam the damned things) were a substantial step above that -- enough of one that even then, QWERTY was largely unjustified.

To get to the point of the entry...

Yes, I've had to pry hammers apart, and yes, I learned to touchtype on a QWERTY. Still use one, too, at 80WPM.

Yep, my mom had an old black manual typewriter that she used for whatever she was working on at the time; I learned to hunt and peck on it, and felt ever so grown up when typing my classwork on it :) I freuquently got the call to unstick the hammers because I had small fingers, too.

I (sortof) learned touch-type on an IBM Selectric in high school, tho... Mom never thought to actually teach me to type, figuring by the time I got to working age, it would be an outmoded form and not much in use in business. Since she can type 115 WPM, and the most I ever managed on a typewriter was 55, I kinda wish she'd had a different viewpoint, lol. Luckily my computer speed is waaaay higher than my typewriter speed.

But if I have to use a typewriter... I'd rather have an old manual one :)

If you mean the cost of switching from a QWERTY to non-QWERTY includes retraining. Yeah, that's a switching cost.

The QWERTY typerwriter is often pointed to as an example of an embedded technology that gets adopted and continued long after the reason has disappeared. But there is also the question of very marginal utility. I'm not sure an alphabetical typerwriter would do better for most typists. We'd still need to train folks in touch-typing. While qwerty causes a bit of confusion the first few times, eventually even the hunt-and-peck folks like me pick it up.

Count me in as one of the people who learned to type on a real manual typewriter.

I had one old typewriter I think I got at a yard sale, and also my mother's typewriter which was a little bit newer. Later in college I got an electronic one.

...had to untangle mechanical and electromechanical typewriter keys, but I was converted to PC at about age 9, and in general only dealt with those beasts when a word processor wasn't available to me.

I've been using the Dvorak layout nearly exclusivey since about 2001.

I didn't learn on my parents' Royal electric (no carriage return key, you had a good old lever to slam), but I did use it. I learned to do fast hunt & peck on an Apple II, and learned proper touch-typing on a real IBM Selectric.

I have used everything from a totally manual Underwood to a Kinesis "well" ergonomic keyboard, but always a QWERTY layout except when outside the US (man, did that French AZERTY screw with my head).

Oh, right, that was another thing that bugged me the first few times I tried to use an electric typewriter: keeping track of whether the model I was using at the time had a return key. The first time I used one that had a return key, I kept reaching up to swat the return lever, not finding it, and completely losing my groove -- I was already used to the return key on computers, but my brain kept going "typewriter, therefore return lever instead". The first time I used an electric that didn't have a return key, I'd finally trained myself to think, "electric, therefore return key," so I kept looking for that and losing my flow by the time I remembered to swat the lever instead.

And then there was the first time I tried to figure out how to set tab stops on a typewriter that wanted them set electronically. I kept looking at the back trying to figure out where the tabs were, despite the fact that the machine in question moved the type-ball and not the platen. Whoops.

(On the mechanical typewriters, I remember that the tabs looked way too flimsy for how hard the carriage slammed into them when you hit the tab key. But I never had one bend or break, so I guess they were strong enough.)

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QWERTY No Longer Justified

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Hitting the keys hard

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switching cost

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