36 ms·

> In other words, the idea is that QWERTY was designed so that humans would type as slowly as possible in order to prevent mechanical jamming. Nope. That's an

> In other words, the idea is that QWERTY was designed so that humans would type as slowly as possible in order to prevent mechanical jamming. Nope. That's an oft cited story but it's not true. The point of QWERTY was actually to increase typing speed. The debunking of this is pretty well documented these days (there even a note on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY#Properties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY#Properties) so it's disappointing an article as researched as the one submitted here has made such an easy to check mistake. But I think the bigger trap it falls into, and the same trap many on HN fall into when posting their anecdotes too, is that RSI isn't universally equivalent. It depends on hand sizes, the keyboards you use, any other hand exercises one might do, underlying health conditions, and even just how you hold your hands at the keyboard. So what might help alleviate RSI for one person could easily make it much worse for another person.

erwald 5y ago
the very next sentence reads: "This idea is apparently false."
- wyattpeak 5y ago
  It does, but the article is pretty cagey in its retraction (including following up with the comment "Though on the other hand, jamming is really bad for typing speed!"). The author seems to me to at least partly still believe its true, merely acknowledging that it's a difficult position to maintain.
  - erwald 5y ago
    i am the author and i didn't mean to be wishy-washy about it. i read several of the papers involved and think it's more likely than not that qwerty was designed for fast typing, or at least not designed to type slowly. but i wouldn't say it's a done deal -- the paper i cited gives the most convincing argument, imo, but it didn't move me up to 100% confidence or anything. i didn't want to give the appearance of being too certain, because i'm not.
    - wyattpeak 5y ago
      Ah, my mistake I'm sorry. Thank you for clarifying your thoughts.
      - cosmiccatnap 5y ago
      - erwald 5y ago
        no need to apologise :)
    - garaetjjte 5y ago
      QWERTY was designed for enabling fast typing by avoiding typebar jams. See http://widespacer.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-hidden-secrets-of-qwerty.html http://widespacer.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-hidden-secrets-of...
    - hnlmorg 5y ago
      The confusion in many articles on the subject is because both the myth and the truth argue that QWERTY was designed to prevent hammer jams. The reason this confuses people is because anecdotally many people find QWERTY slower to find keys ergo many laymans assume QWERTY was designed to slow typing down to avoid jams (in fairness, it's not an unreasonable piece of logical deduction even if it's not technically accurate). The reality was that typists were trained to type on QWERTY so they weren't slow typing on it. What QWERTY was designed to do was move common follow on characters further away from each other so the hammers jammed less often thus allowing trained typists to type faster than they could have on an alphabetized layout.
  - chipotle_coyote 5y ago
    Given that the person you are replying to is the author, I'm guessing he probably does not "partly still believe it's true." I'm going to bang on the "give people generous readings" drum here, too: "Jamming is really bad for typing speed" is not "pretty cagey," it's "a humorous comment." (Also, you know, technically correct.)
jacobolus 5y ago
The point of the QWERTY layout was to prevent jamming; the prototype layout was roughly alphabetical on the keyboard and jammed constantly, so it was refined to fix that mechanical problem. The part that is a myth was that they prevented jamming by “slowing typists down”. What they did is moved commonly adjacently pressed letters apart from each-other so they wouldn’t be pressed at about the same time. This was not done explicitly to speed or slow typists (at the time, there was no established typing technique and there were no expert typists), except insofar as a constantly jammed keyboard was extremely slow. But the nearness that mattered was in the ring of typebars on the Sholes/Glidden/Schwalbach/Densmore typewriter, not the nearness of the keys on the keyboard per se. This typewriter connected the keys to typebars which were placed around a ring and struck upward at the platen. The association between keys on the keyboard and the positions around the ring is not obvious. https://blog.nms.ac.uk/app/uploads/2018/08/Figure-13.jpg https://blog.nms.ac.uk/app/uploads/2018/08/Figure-13.jpg https://blog.nms.ac.uk/2018/08/11/re-typing-history-the-sholes-glidden-typewriter-and-the-qwerty-keyboard/ https://blog.nms.ac.uk/2018/08/11/re-typing-history-the-shol... They started by trying to place common English digraphs onto typebars at opposite ends of the ring, then swapped keys around via trial/error until they got the jamming problem mostly under control. Later the Remington company did a few more swaps so that "TYPEWRITER" could be typed entirely on the top row, as a marketing gimmick. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sholes_and_Glidden_typewriter#QWERTY_keyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sholes_and_Glidden_typewriter#... The true part of the common QWERTY criticism is that the layout of the keys was not decided primarily based on the positions on the keyboard or human hand anatomy. As a result, the keyboard layout per se (both the positioning of the physical keys themselves and the choice of association between letters and keys) is not especially efficient or ergonomic. A related (milder) criticism can be leveled at the Dvorak layout, which was designed for the typewriter technology of ~1930, where the home row and top row of the keyboard were easy to press but the bottom row was much slower and less convenient, based on the consistent steep step between rows of keys. Computer keyboards have always had a different physical shape compared to 1930s typewriters, so the relative difficulty of typing different key combinations is different, and an optimized layout therefore looks different.
- Findecanor 5y ago
  The story about marketing and "TYPEWRITER" on the same row is also considered a myth by some historians, simply because Remington spelled it "Type-Writer" and - was not on that row. That the layout was intended for typing at speed is corroborated by the fact that early users of (pre-Remington) typewriters were telegraphists who used them to transcribe telegrams from Morse code at the speed at which it was being received.

erwald 5y ago

the very next sentence reads: "This idea is apparently false."

wyattpeak 5y ago
It does, but the article is pretty cagey in its retraction (including following up with the comment "Though on the other hand, jamming is really bad for typing speed!"). The author seems to me to at least partly still believe its true, merely acknowledging that it's a difficult position to maintain.
- erwald 5y ago
  i am the author and i didn't mean to be wishy-washy about it. i read several of the papers involved and think it's more likely than not that qwerty was designed for fast typing, or at least not designed to type slowly. but i wouldn't say it's a done deal -- the paper i cited gives the most convincing argument, imo, but it didn't move me up to 100% confidence or anything. i didn't want to give the appearance of being too certain, because i'm not.
  - wyattpeak 5y ago
    Ah, my mistake I'm sorry. Thank you for clarifying your thoughts.
    - cosmiccatnap 5y ago
    - erwald 5y ago
      no need to apologise :)
  - garaetjjte 5y ago
    QWERTY was designed for enabling fast typing by avoiding typebar jams. See http://widespacer.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-hidden-secrets-of-qwerty.html http://widespacer.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-hidden-secrets-of...
  - hnlmorg 5y ago
    The confusion in many articles on the subject is because both the myth and the truth argue that QWERTY was designed to prevent hammer jams. The reason this confuses people is because anecdotally many people find QWERTY slower to find keys ergo many laymans assume QWERTY was designed to slow typing down to avoid jams (in fairness, it's not an unreasonable piece of logical deduction even if it's not technically accurate). The reality was that typists were trained to type on QWERTY so they weren't slow typing on it. What QWERTY was designed to do was move common follow on characters further away from each other so the hammers jammed less often thus allowing trained typists to type faster than they could have on an alphabetized layout.
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago
  Given that the person you are replying to is the author, I'm guessing he probably does not "partly still believe it's true." I'm going to bang on the "give people generous readings" drum here, too: "Jamming is really bad for typing speed" is not "pretty cagey," it's "a humorous comment." (Also, you know, technically correct.)

jacobolus 5y ago

The point of the QWERTY layout was to prevent jamming; the prototype layout was roughly alphabetical on the keyboard and jammed constantly, so it was refined to fix that mechanical problem. The part that is a myth was that they prevented jamming by “slowing typists down”. What they did is moved commonly adjacently pressed letters apart from each-other so they wouldn’t be pressed at about the same time. This was not done explicitly to speed or slow typists (at the time, there was no established typing technique and there were no expert typists), except insofar as a constantly jammed keyboard was extremely slow. But the nearness that mattered was in the ring of typebars on the Sholes/Glidden/Schwalbach/Densmore typewriter, not the nearness of the keys on the keyboard per se. This typewriter connected the keys to typebars which were placed around a ring and struck upward at the platen. The association between keys on the keyboard and the positions around the ring is not obvious. https://blog.nms.ac.uk/app/uploads/2018/08/Figure-13.jpg https://blog.nms.ac.uk/app/uploads/2018/08/Figure-13.jpg https://blog.nms.ac.uk/2018/08/11/re-typing-history-the-sholes-glidden-typewriter-and-the-qwerty-keyboard/ https://blog.nms.ac.uk/2018/08/11/re-typing-history-the-shol... They started by trying to place common English digraphs onto typebars at opposite ends of the ring, then swapped keys around via trial/error until they got the jamming problem mostly under control. Later the Remington company did a few more swaps so that "TYPEWRITER" could be typed entirely on the top row, as a marketing gimmick. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sholes_and_Glidden_typewriter#QWERTY_keyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sholes_and_Glidden_typewriter#... The true part of the common QWERTY criticism is that the layout of the keys was not decided primarily based on the positions on the keyboard or human hand anatomy. As a result, the keyboard layout per se (both the positioning of the physical keys themselves and the choice of association between letters and keys) is not especially efficient or ergonomic. A related (milder) criticism can be leveled at the Dvorak layout, which was designed for the typewriter technology of ~1930, where the home row and top row of the keyboard were easy to press but the bottom row was much slower and less convenient, based on the consistent steep step between rows of keys. Computer keyboards have always had a different physical shape compared to 1930s typewriters, so the relative difficulty of typing different key combinations is different, and an optimized layout therefore looks different.

Findecanor 5y ago
The story about marketing and "TYPEWRITER" on the same row is also considered a myth by some historians, simply because Remington spelled it "Type-Writer" and - was not on that row. That the layout was intended for typing at speed is corroborated by the fact that early users of (pre-Remington) typewriters were telegraphists who used them to transcribe telegrams from Morse code at the speed at which it was being received.