@Daojoan Can I ask you a question?

@Daojoan I remember seeing a video (think it was Vsauce. Not sure, that was a long time ago) that explained that the size of satellites was limited by the width of rockets, which was limited by the width of train tracks, which was directly related to the width of a pair of horses. The path might be different than I remember but the idea is that we carried a constraint all the way from the Neolithic to the Space age

@Daojoan Dvorak isn't faster so much as it is a lot more comfortable. I am capable of typing in both QWERTY and Dvorak, and while I do type a little faster in Dvorak, that's probably just because I use it more because it's more comfortable.

@Daojoan
The U.S. standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is four feet, eight and a half inches.

That’s an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used? Because that’s the way they built them in England, and English expatriates built the U.S. railroads.

Why did the English people build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the prerailroad tramways, and that’s the gauge they used.

Why did ‘they’ use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Why did the wagons use that odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing the wagons would break on some of the old, long-distance roads, because that’s the spacing of the old wheel ruts.

So who built these old rutted roads? The first long-distance roads in Europe were built by Imperial Rome for the benefit of its legions. The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts? Roman war chariots made the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagons. Since the chariots were made for or by Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Thus, the standard U.S. railroad gauge of four feet, eight and a half inches derives from the specification for an Imperial Roman army war chariot. Specs and bureaucracies live forever.

So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse’s ass came up with it, you may be exactly right. Because the Imperial Roman chariots were made to be just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two warhorses.

@Daojoan I have dyspraxia. Please don't move the keys around 😭

@Daojoan some label printers and on screen keyboards for smart TVs are ABCDEF

@Daojoan some label printers and on screen keyboards for smart TVs are ABCDEF

@Daojoan The electoral college comes to mind.

@Daojoan eyeballs!

@Daojoan ctrl+alt+del was chosen as a key combination to send a soft reset to an IBM PC when developing the hardware so that they wouldn't have to reach over an hit a dedicated reset switch. It was just never taken out.

Years later, Windows had a problem with password stealers that mimicked the Windows login prompt. Their solution? Invoke the login prompt with ctrl+alt+del since it generates a hardware interrupt that cannot be intercepted by a user-level application.

Then they just kept that.

@Daojoan literally whole internet uses one tcp port now because of late 90's firewalls

@Daojoan The thing is... that testing has shown there's no real advantage to learning a less common but 'more optimal' key layout.

You can learn DVORAK all you want, but the main thing that speeds up typing is practice, not layout. A highly practiced QWERTY keyboard user will out-type an average DVORAK keyboard user any day. It's all about the fingers and the muscle memory and it being wired into the nerves at a hand level rather than at a brain level.

There are other myths to dispel in your post but that's probably the most important one to me.

Yes, I agree with your general point - that supporting legacy systems often ends up costing more than the overall change to a new system would.

I see this all the time with customers who want our company to support versions of our software that are over a decade old. When you drill down into it, they want that because there's some old piece of software that is no longer in warranty and on which their entire system depends and is only supposed to run on a version of our software we haven't supported in a decade. So they're prepared to spend lots of money paying us for extended support, because they haven't even begun to try and work out how to get off that old, unsupported, third party software. They would pay us more money than it would take to simply buy new sofware.

And let's not get started on skeuomorphisms.

@Daojoan

do na djuno lo ka zo'u?

( https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban )

@Daojoan To your point (forget about QWERTY) I think it's easy to see this if you look for it. Big one is Linux access control: millions of online store web servers with user accounts but they never use USERIDs, that was for timeshare back in the day.

@Daojoan

Dvorak Keyboard *exists*.

@Daojoan
Let's talk about Ethernet.
IEEE 802.3 Ethernet is an excellent protocol.
Every company that has bet against Ethernet has died.
(Infiniband being the next proprietary interconnect scheduled to give way)
But "layer 2" (ugh) networking doesn't scale, & it was never supposed to scale, & originally it was specifically designed as a best-effort protocol so that it could even work at all.

@Daojoan "Contrary to popular belief, the QWERTY layout was not designed to slow the typist down, but rather to speed up typing. Indeed, there is evidence that, aside from the issue of jamming, placing often-used keys farther apart increases typing speed, because it encourages alternation between the hands." --wiki

I am a touch typer and can't think of how the current layout could be improved.

@Daojoan

We've always done it this way.

@Daojoan
urban legend.
The researchers tracked the evolution of the typewriter keyboard alongside a record of its early professional users. They conclude that the mechanics of the typewriter did not influence the keyboard design. Rather, the QWERTY system emerged as a result of how the first typewriters were being used. Early adopters and beta-testers included telegraph operators who needed to quickly transcribe messages from Morse Code
http://kanji.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/%7Eyasuoka/publications/PreQWERTY.html
reject the idea

@Daojoan

I think it's also largely arbitrary, which is why most alternatives are nichey.

Optimizing layout for typing -- typing what? English? Spanish? German? (Considering only Roman alphabetic here)

At some point it's your nonconscious learned semiautonomous embodied skill, like shoelace tying, drinking water from a cup, etc, doing the work. The whole POINT of these sorts of skills is to render them not conscious.

I doubt there is a layout that makes your fingers happier reaching for a particular letter, beyond some basics like common keys (sic) clustered near the center etc.

@Daojoan Thank for asking such a profound ?

If both parties would focus on these issues…
Who knows where that kind of thinking could lead us!

@Daojoan

Backspace still exists even though you do not need whiteout to fix your typo.

Carriage Return and Line Feed still exist too.

The Escape function has changed. In olden daze, you would rip out the paper and start over. Progress!

@Daojoan 80 column code is cause of punchcards

@Daojoan the Electoral College is another great example of this. I’m coining the term right now: Vestigial Systems.

@Daojoan the fact computers do not jam is a testament to QWERTY's success across multiple domains!

I did try dvorak for a while, got my typing speed up on it. Easy enough to swap around on a model m, with the uniform two part keys.

It is better. It even feels better.

Until windows randomly reverts it's layout for some inputs. Or you go to type on ... any other keyboard ever.

@Daojoan @briankrebs Actually, it wasn’t - this has been investigated and debunked. It was consultation with telegraph operators that mostly influenced the layout. https://repository.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2433/139379/1/42_161.pdf

@Daojoan

The eyeball routing the nerve fibres IN FRONT OF the light sensing rods and cones, before sending the entire nerve bundle through a hole in the light sensing coverage.

Is a personal favourite

@Daojoan like the save 💾 icon

@Daojoan they make the alphabetical keyboards if you want them.

@Daojoan Here's a big one:

Capitalism.

How'd we know? <gestures broadly>

@Daojoan I recommended a change to IBM over 50 years ago while working there. They thought I was being silly.

@Daojoan Keyboard is a bit more complex (eg there are reasons typewriter is all one one row...)

Obvious other ones
- The 4'8 and a bit standard railway gauge was basically arrived at by network effects and nearby mining railways. It's way too narrow but we persist in running trains over it at high speed because it's easier than fixing the track width
- Long summer school holidays in many countries so kids could help with the harvest
- The floppy disk icon for save

@Daojoan the one that stays with me most is learning that crash test dummies were originally mostly adult male cadavers, and then when they replaced them with actual dummies, they were still mostly only male body types. I think they only evolved how they test vehicles in the 1990s, maybe, with a greater variety of test dummy shapes/sizes.

@Daojoan Right on Red

'fuel saving" measure during the 73 oil crisis. didn't work then, endangers everyone in public for nothing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn_on_red

@Daojoan

As I vaguely recall, the standard 80 character column width for used terminals and recommended maximum line length for code (e.g., PEP-8) is a holdover from the IBM punch card standard that specified 80 columns, which is itself a holdover from early 19th century loom technology for fabric weaving.

@Daojoan @briankrebs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_institutionalism
I teach this in my IT-related business school courses.

@Daojoan This is not really true. QWERTY was (most likely) designed as a result of feedback from mechanical telegraph operators, in order to make their typing easier: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-qwerty-keyboard-will-never-die-where-did-the-150-year-old-design-come-from-49863249/

To the extent that the "jamming" story is true (to some extent, it is; jamming was a mechanical concern) the way that a layout avoids jamming is by placing letters that frequently occur adjacent to each other on opposing hands, which *is* better for operator ergonomics too.

@Daojoan Try calling a folder "aux", "con" or "lpt" on Windows. Y'know, for auxiliary files, the opposite of "pro" arguments, and life-pro-tips.

@Daojoan

Screen characters have various standards for encoding those glyphs in binary, the most common are ASCII and Unicode. But along with the visible characters there are also codes to represent things like indentation (the tab character \t) or a new line (\n).

These codes used to control machinery. \n would roll the paper down in the teletype printer, and \r would return the print head to the start of the line.

1/2

@Daojoan lightheartedly pointing out, this is dangerously close to being a #nickland post

https://www.urbanomic.com/chapter/fanged-noumena-introduction-to-qwernomics/

@Daojoan
Monarchy?
Scroll lock?
Quite a lot of Men?

@Daojoan

I switched to Dvorak keyboard layout and all was great. But the world didn't change with me 🥺

@Daojoan

You are obviously unaeare of several dozens other existing keyboard layouts.

@Daojoan Try to rename your harddisk/SSD to letter A: or B: ...

@Daojoan Oh man don’t get me started.

“Special characters”
File extensions
File compression

@Daojoan please no, you’ll bring out the Dvorak crowd

‘Dvorak is more efficient, people who learn Dvorak can type faster’ I see this a lot, but the word per minute increase is because people who learn Dvorak are spending time *formally learning to type!*

Neither one is ‘more efficient’ than the other. How would you even measure that, it’s all so silly.

@Daojoan It is not that easy to switch. I learned qwerty blind typing, so e.g. switching to Dworak or Azerty will make me to learn blind typing again.

I admit, that qwerty has a lot of issues. E.g. Del (delete) is definitely in the wrong place. When you doing 3D / 2D edit that operation is used frequently. Sure you can use ctrl + x, but some times you dont want to override buffer data (majority of editors dont support buffer stack).

There some curios keyboards around. e.g. beeraider.

@Daojoan After "the fall", when our energy grids are all offline, manual typewriters will be back with a vengeance and our ASDFG typing skills will be essential.

@Daojoan there's also row stagger which I'm proud to be rid of

@Daojoan We would know by questioning the status quo all the time! Why do we still have 360 degrees in a circle? Why do we still shake hands?

@Daojoan I mean, just staying on the topic of keyboards: the offset between the rows is there so that the levers for the four rows (numbers and letters) can go right next to each other.

@Daojoan On-screen keyboards, say like on phones, are much more varied and quite customizable.

@Daojoan Just look to the works of Frederick Taylor and Elton Mayo for how to mold man to benefit (the owners of) machines.

@Daojoan marriage
Cursive
Saucers
Coffins
Labeling the large chips as "Family" or "Party" size

@Daojoan all of the institutions of representative democracy were designed in a world without telecommunications or even reliable transport faster than a horse.

we have things like electoral colleges because that was a reasonable trade-off at the time between wanting to have a democratic process and needing to actually make decisions in a timely manner.

@Daojoan And of course an additional challenge is to distinguish between “unneeded solutions to problems that no longer exist” and “solutions that are the reason WHY the problems no longer exist, without which the problems would come roaring back.”

@Daojoan path dependency!

@Daojoan

There's that ancient internet meme about how space shuttle engines are based on the width of a horse...

But never mind engineering, think of our DNA!

@Daojoan *laughs in Dvorak*

@Daojoan we could always check the appendix! <rimshot> <booing>

@Daojoan I watched a video essay on this, and there are keyboard styles better fit to typing. Wish I remembered it offhand so I could link it. Though I know your point is bigger than that!