Talk: Dvorak-QWERTY

In article <36uu7f$fq...@gagme.wwa.com> bob...@wwa.com (Bob Allison) writes:
>
>Bram Cohen <bco...@cs.buffalo.edu> wrote:
>>
>>An interesting thing about the QWERTY layout is that consecutive letters are 
>>placed pretty close together. If you look at the position of each letter 
>>starting a, b, c, and so on, they're all pretty close together, in fact many
>>pairs are right next to each other (specifically, cde,fgh,ijkl,mn,op.) 
>>Apparently not much thought was put into that layout at all, but since it 
>>was supposed to be bad, that doesn't make much difference.
>
>
>   A couple of other things.  One is the physical layout of the actual 
>keys themselves.  How ergonomic is that?  Another is what Apple did with 
>the split keyboard they make.
>

I don't know if there is any truth to this or not, but here's what I've heard.
The QWERTY keyboard was laid out to spread out the keys that were most
commonly used in succession.  The reason for this was on the old typewriters,
the impact arms would get caught in each other if you typed close keys too
fast.  (I'm sure everyone did that as a kid, pounding on all the keys.)

It may not be true, but it sounds good.

-Brett

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