The myth goes roughly as follows. When certain combinations of keys were struck quickly, the type bars often jammed. This made the keyboard slow, the story goes, but that was the idea. A different layout, which had been patented by August Dvorak in 1936, was shown to be much faster. Because, the story continues, that first inefficient standard became locked in.
Carriage return A fine tale, but largely fiction.
The paper by Messrs Liebowitz and Margolis shows, in the first place, that the first evidence supporting claims of Dvorak's superiority was extremely thin. Interest in Dvorak among companies and government agencies had lately been increasing, but it came to an end with that finding. They find that neither design of keyboard has a clear advantage over the other. There is no market failure. Their views on this larger question are for another article.