AT&T Tech Support 360December 22, 2005 5:55 AM PST
Taking on QWERTY's illogic
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One of a long line of entrepreneurs and scientists who have been outraged by the seeming illogic of the standard QWERTY keyboard, the 62-year-old electrical engineer is showing off a new, rival keyboard design next month at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
He touted the idea at CES last year, too, but this time, he has actual keyboards that will be released to distributors in February. After years of hunt-and-peck typing, he's convinced that there is room for change and that if he can show the way, bigger companies might follow.
"For the longest time, I thought, like everyone else, there's nothing you can do about QWERTY," Parkinson said. "In the end, some ideas occurred to me, and I decided to do something about it myself."
Like many of those that have come before, Parkinson's New Standard Keyboards are arranged alphabetically but with a twist. Instead of lining up the letters all the way across, he splits the keyboard in two, like most ergonomic keyboards. He then assigns the first half of the alphabet to the left hand and the second half to the right.
Is this enough to finally unshackle the typing legions from the mixed-up mess of an ordinary keyboard? Probably not. The average typist has spent enough time learning the QWERTY keyboard to make relearning even a better system unlikely, most experts say.
The QWERTY keyboard itself--named after the position of the first six letters in the top left hand corner--is mostly an accident of mid-19th mechanical technology.
Modern typewriter inventor Christopher Sholes initially experimented with arranging the keys in alphabetical order but discovered that the bars holding the letters collided and jammed too often as they struck the paper. He rearranged the letters into their current form in order to keep commonly used letters on different sides of the machine, reducing those collisions.
A well-publicized typing contest between the first QWERTY touch typist and a rival using a different system helped settle the issue in the public mind. The QWERTY user, a court reporter named Frank McGurrin, won hands down and went on a celebrity tour around the United States to show off his lightning-fast fingers.
In 1936, University of Washington professor August Dvorak patented a new system. Research on the system, he claimed, showed that it was vastly more efficient than the QWERTY layout. While many still accept Dvorak's claim, the actual product failed to undermine QWERTY's dominance.
The computer age has seen much more experimentation, from one-handed keyboards to virtual keys in which finger motion is read by lasers. The only real changes to be adopted widely have been the ergonomic evolutions, in which the two sides of the keyboard are split and rotated slightly away from each other, to let the hands rest more naturally.
"There's pretty strong evidence that the split keyboard...has a health advantage and can help reduce hand and arm pain," said David Rempel, a professor of medicine and ergonomics at the University of San Francisco.
There's no substantial evidence, however, that simply rearranging the keys offers health benefits, Rempel said.
Parkinson, a former aerospace engineer, said he was inspired to action after taking a typing class in which he reached 25 words a minute but then went back to hunt-and-peck after finding the touch-typing technique too distracting.
He concedes that earlier alphabetical designs have been even worse than QWERTY. But by splitting the alphabet into two groups, the letters wind up being placed more efficiently, he said. It puts punctuation and other keys in the center, potentially making them easier to reach.
He's ultimately hoping to work with larger companies but so far has been unable to spark their interest, he said.
"I pursued that aspect a little bit but decided it would be better to put it on market myself and prove (that) people want it," he said. "Then, maybe, the big companies will be interested."
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I don't have huge hands, but they are big enough that if all the keys I used most were right in the middle of the keyboard I would be in my own way.
Place your own hand on the table in front of you in a method that is comfortable and you will notice your own fingers are spread out. It is more natural to have them spread out than right up against each other.
I like to spread out my fingers/hands out on the keyboard and that is basically the what QWERTY was designed to do.
So in my opinion the very design of QWERTY was to reduce collisions and I still use it for the same reason today.
The design is as follows, you hold your fingers at asdfjklö (last letter is different on different keyboard, I'm using a swedisn one, I think it's ; on americans). Then hold the appropriate bit pattern for the right ascii char. For example B is 66 wich means you should hold down D and L, and then press space to input.
Download a driverlike thingy written in asm here: http://www.programmersheaven.com/zone5/cat710/41216.htm
This will never be a good system, becouse it's so hard to learn, but if you allready know binary and ascii it shouldn't be to hard to get really fast speed with this.
Philip
Senior Information Architect/HCI Specialist
personally, i pray that my 386-sx keyboard, which i've atch'd to every computer i've made since i bought that machine in the 80s, holds out until voice recognition becomes a practical alternative.
mark d.
What I find, however, is that I keep going back to my old QWERTY keyboard. It is an old Dell keyboard where the buttons clack and a couple stick. But, I do not have to think when I write about the keyboard. I know it and love it. My belief is that a lot of people feel the same. My kids, 5, 7 and 9 all use QWERTY keyboards and would be lost on a new style.
I think QWERTY will be here for another generation.
This is just a bad idea. Hope it never flys.
used to it, it causes no problems that any other layout might
correct. Dviorak may have had a case when the world was filled
with 60+ wpm stenographers, but those days are long gone. Voice
writing is about to arrive on the scene. and until it does, the Qwerty
keyboard layout is more than adequate.
John Parkinson, ake your time, money, and effort, and go find a real
problem.
the letters are placed differently it will jam up, and 2) if you type to
quickly it will jam up. So the point of qwerty is to layout the
keyboard in a way that is easy, comfortable, and efficient to type in
while keeping the typewritter still typing.
I can ALMOST understand adjusting qwerty (though I prefer it) but, don't change the physical layout!
Is there a layout that would optimize my use of some keys more often than others? Is there a more ergonomic organization?
Older keyboards are hard plastic and put together well. Today's keyboards are made of thin, weak, cheap plastic. Even the expensive and "nice" keyboards are made out of the same cheap plastic.
A majority of the computer users in the world have probably never had a chance to use a real, solid keyboard. So they don't know any better. But I think any veteran user would agree that a 10 year old keyboard beats the pants off anything they're producing today.
--
Bradley
http://www.gtalkprofile.com/
As a user of the latter, I'd say QWERTY is better.
Of course, until I try out this new keyboard, I will not know for sure.
For those people who think the QWERTY keyboard spaces things out just try typing "only in minimum pumpkin". QWERTY, as stated by others, had nothing to do with keystroke efficiency. It had to do with placing keys such that the operator did not get faster than the machine. As machines got better then typists could get faster too.
I knew a typist well over a decade ago who could type over 120 words per minute (using four character plus one space -- i.e., five key strokes -- as a "standard word", thus it did not matter what the exact text was, just divide by six characters per word). Yet when he (yes he) used a Dvorak keyboard (which he preferred) he could approach 160 words per minute.
Bye-the-bye the record is 212 wpm on an Apple ][c using the built-in ability to swich the keyboard layout from the standard QWERTY layout to the Dvorak layout which the typist used. Yes, the world record was set using a Dvorak layout.
However...
That does not mean we will ever see anything other than QWERTY being shipped as a standard. I doubt QWERTY will ever be replaced -- at least not until the entire keyboard input technology is replaced.
The QWERTY system works so well for those that learn it for the same reason that it worked so well for typewriters of its inventor's era - if I am required to hit keys with opposite hands more often, each hand has more time to spend positioning itself for the next 1 - 2 keystrokes.
Any new keyboard layout is doomed to fail on a large scale, imho, as corporations and individuals will not bear the productivity costs of living in a dual-standards world for those transition years.
Better to make typing courses mandatory in grade school so that future generations will not be challenged by the so-called cryptic QWERTY system.
Less ambitious and expensive ones are made by Kinesis!
Enjoy!
www.bitsofabyte.com
- hate to be a skeptic
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by
December 22, 2005 11:29 AM PST
- I hate to be a skeptic, but with all the special keys at the bottom, I think one's wrists would constantly brush them.
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