Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2005-12-17:

"I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.

"If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us --- the dignity of man."

-- Harold Pinter, in "Art, Truth & Politics", Nobel Lecture, 7 December 2005.

(submitted to the mailing list by Jeffrey L. Copeland)

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 tiredlazy 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.