From: jaap@alice.att.com (jaap)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: Origin of QWERTY
Date: 16 Oct 92 22:54:02 GMT
Article-I.D.: alice.23912
Reply-To: jaap@alice.UUCP ()
Organization: AT&T, Bell Labs

In article <id.TU3U.8P3@ferranti.com> peter@ferranti.com (peter da silva) writes:
 > In article <1992Oct14.132501.7027@cis.ohio-state.edu> conaway@carp.cis.ohio-state.edu (jason william conaway) writes:
 > > The old mechanical type writers were prone to jamming caused by fast typing.
 > 
 > No, they were prone to jamming caused by hitting adjacent characters too fast.
 > It's been a long time since I've seen a mechanical typewriter, so I guess
 > you may never have seen one. The typehead is on a bar about 5-6 inches long,
 > that wings through an arc of several inches, and if two adjacent letters are
 > struck the typewriter is very likely to jam.
 > 
 > The QWERTY keyboard was designed so that adjacent letters in words would be
 > separate from each other in the type mechanism as much as possible. The keyboard
 > and the type mechanism are pretty tightly coupled, so it wasn't really
 > practical to build things differently.
 > 
 > Given this requirement, the QWERTY keyboard was ALSO designed to also allow
 > the operator to type as fast as possible. Slowing down the operator was not
 > a design goal, and the clumsiness of QWERTY is pretty much overrated.

On a regular base the QWERTY question pops up on this net work, I
estimate about once a year.  And always the same answer is supplied:
It is to slow down the typist to prevenyt the jamming of the hammers.
The way this is state makes it always seem that there had been a very
efficient and fast key placement before, but had to be abandand due to
mechanical problems.

Amazingly enough there is never a source quoted, which makes the
answer looks like an urban legend.

Last year I blundered against the book ``The Wonderful Writing
Machine'' by Bruce Bliven Jr, Random House, 1954, Library of Congres
Card Number 54-5955.  It treats the history and future(!)  of the
typewriter.  About the QWERTY keyboard he writes (page 143):

``It is all Shole's fault.  There is no positive explanation for what
he did.  he did not follow the arrangment of the printer's type cse,
as has been written time and time again; that is pure legend.  Sholes,
according to his friend and associate, Dr. Robey, first set the keys
in alphabetical order.  Certainly there are vestiges of it, especially
across the middle row:  ``fghjkl'' for example with the missing ``i''
on the line above, not far out of place.  But as Sholes struggled
through one model after another he constantly changed the keyboard
order, trying tpo avoid certain collisions and jamming that cropped
up.  By the time Densmore and Yost were ready to sell Sholes
experimantal machine to Philo Reminton.  It had gotten too:

	2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 - ,
	Q W E . T Y I U O P
	Z D F G H J K L M
	A X & C V B N ? ; R

And a few months later, after the Reminton mechanics had had a go at
improving things, it was:

	1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 - , _
	Q W E R T Y U I O P : 
	| A S D F G H J K L M
	& Z C X V B N ? ; . ,

[Note that there is actully no |, but there are three dots above each
other drawn at that position, jna]

Which is very close to what we've got now, the main difference being the
transposed ``C'' and ``X'' and the addition od characters made possible
by the invention of the shift:

	" # $ % - & ' ( ) *
	2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 _
	Q W E R T Y U I O P (1/4)
	q w e r t y u i o p (1/2)
	A S D F G H J K L : @
	a s d f g h j k l ; (cent)
	Z X C V B N M , . ?
	z x c v b n m , . /

[The (1/2) and (1/4) is the half and the quart, while the (cent) is
the c with a slash, jna].

Then Mr. Bliven continue to say that this arrangment is inefficient for
three reasons.

1) Most typist are right handed, while this keyboard clearly gives the
left hand 56 % from the key strokes,

2) it gives the fingers of the left hand too much work to do, including
the two toughest ones, the shift-lock and the back-spacer,

3) and finally, it demands an entirely unnecessary amount of awkward
reaching because it ignores the frequency of which letters are used.
(and he goes in quite some details about that).

So yes, apparently the qwerty uiop keyboard is the way it is because
it was the easiest way to get it to work.  But there is no evidence that
a better keyboard or more efficienter was sacrificed for qwerty uiop.

Als, note that later typewriters didn't had any problems with jamming
any more.  ``Dozens of sensible reform keyboards have been invented
...''

But they didn't catch on ``If the publice would buy it, Royal,
Remington, Smith Corona Underwood and IBM would all be selling it.''

In the same book there are some interesting stories about speed
typing.  Before the standard definition of five-stroke words, it was
apparently possible to do 147 actual words a minute on an Underwood
model 5 in 1923 after some training.

        jaap