At 2:04 PM -0700 10/16/06, Rick Stevens wrote: >On Mon, 2006-10-16 at 10:56 -0700, Mike Wright wrote: ... >> I love watching people who don't know about Dvorak trying to use a >> keyboard. Talk about security through obscurity ;D > >I don't want to start a flame war here, but the QWERTY layout was >designed _specifically_ to slow typists down so they didn't jam up the >old manual typewriter mechanisms. ... This is false. The Quwerty layout was designed to minimize the number of times that adjacent key levers on the bail would be used at the same time. It was /not/ an effort to slow typists; it was an effort to /increase/ typing speed by reducing jams. Dvorak is about 10% faster, for equivalently trained typists. If one is already a Dvorak-trained typist, then it is useful. If one doesn't type at all, learning Dvorak may make sense, provided that the Dvorak layout will always be available. Otherwise, it is probably more effective to learn to type better with layout one already knows, even if it's that wretched French alphabetical layout, than it is to start over with a new layout. -- ____________________________________________________________________ TonyN.:' The Great Writ <mailto:tonynelson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> ' is no more. <http://www.georgeanelson.com/>
