The QWERTY keyboard was designed to reduce mechanical jamming in early typewriters.
We kept it for computers. Which don't jam.
How many of our systems are just preserved solutions to problems that no longer exist?
And how would we even know?
Post
Replies:
0
@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 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 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.
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
start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet#History
in the 1970s, a 3mbps interconnect was crazy fast. Concepts of less-than-100%-reliable packet switching were gaining traction.
At the time, Inspired by ALOHAnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALOHAnet the designers figured the only economic way to share this fast interconnect between a lot of computers was to use a coaxial cable as if it were a packet radio network. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-sense_multiple_access_with_collision_detection
the idea of an inexpensive carrier-sense-multiple-access link-layer network was born.
@Daojoan so the networking world became very very accustomed to two things:
- a 1500 byte Maximum Transmit Unit, which was the standard on the original 10mbps 802.3 Ethernet
- connecting a bunch of computers to a common Ethernet, & relying on the fact that they all listen to eachother's packet splattercasts across this directly-connected Ethernet to build discovery & various other "automatic" features into protocols & applications.
@Daojoan so,
-1500 bytes became "the Internet MTU" that no one ever dares exceed (even in their own networks where that hasn't been a limitation for several decades), and
- enterprises tunnel Ethernet all over the place, & continue come up with new & interesting ways for vendors & service providers to charge them for services that maintain their precious emulation of a 1970s coaxial cable emulating a packet radio broadcast network.
Meanwhile, (at host/office scale networking where this is applicable) "layer 3" IP routing has not been a more expensive operation to perform in hardware than Ethernet switching since about 2009 or so.
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
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!
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
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.
