using the best tools for the job

typing by touch

QWERTY is 138 years old this year. It was invented by Christopher Scholes in 1878 to solve the then major problem preventing people from typing at speed. If adjacent keys were typed in rapid succession the keys stuck together in mid-air so that the typist had to stop and untangle the keys.

Thanks to the power of Remington, which bought the patent from Scholes and marketed it QWERTY has dominated the world of typewriting ever since. That dominance has continued into the computer age so that all computer keyboards for English and European languages are engraved with the QWERTY layout.

Touch typing was not invented until eight years after QWERTY. But the men at Remington did not have to learn it. They had scores of women, who went off on a one-year course to learn QWERTY and to translate the dictated words, or the handwriting, of their bosses into typescript.

Today the vast majority of the millions who use computers do not have secretaries to input their words. And most of them manage with two or three fingers but they don’t know how quickly and easily they could learn to touch type.

What they do not know is that a far better keyboard layout was invented by August Dvorak in 1934 and that this layout is available on their computers in all the  leading operating systems, such as Windows, Applemac , Linux and Unix. The minority who have heard of Dvorak are deterred from making the change because the computers they have to use do not have the Dvorak layout printed on the keyboard. Although once you have learnt to touch type this does not matter because your fingers have learnt to find the correct keys by touch, it is a substantial deterrent in the learning period.

Since Dvorak can be learnt in one third of the time it takes to learn QWERTY most computer users could surpass their existing typing speed by no more than three or four weeks practice for half an hour a day. But they are unlikely to make the effort until the leading manufacturers produce keyboards which have both the QWERTY and the keyboard layouts on the keyboard.

This is highly unlikely to happen if left to the forces of the free market because, although the investment required is quite small, there is no prospect of the change leading to bigger profits. 

It is also unlikely that the public sector will fund such a move. Governments have many other priorities. Individual teachers, who may see the advantages of children and young people learning Dvorak, are not in a position to make the change while computers just have QWERTY engraved on their keyboards.

Change will only happen via the third way, the charitable sector. It requires a philanthropist, rich enough to fund the initial changes and to market them   to a sceptical world.

Stand up Bill Gates, who has just announced that he is stepping down as the boss of Microsoft to devote himself to charitable works.  The change would enable people to use the Microsoft software more efficiently. And the big beneficiaries would be the children of the world.

How about it, Bill.

 

 

Time to Retire QWERTY