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'to allow typewriter salesmen to easily type the word "typewriter" and to prevent typebars from sticking' Is that actually true?
by mdonahoe 15y ago
'to allow typewriter salesmen to easily type the word "typewriter" and to prevent typebars from sticking'
Is that actually true?
- wonderzombie 15y agoI was deeply skeptical, too. Wikipedia calls the "typewriter" unsubstantiated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY. It's repeated a lot, though! There's a link to a paper which discusses it in more detail: http://kanji.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~yasuoka/publications/PreQWERTY.html http://kanji.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~yasuoka/publications/PreQ.... Anyway, Wikipedia spends some time discussing jams and so on, so perhaps that's legit.
- batista 15y agoThe "prevent typebars from sticking" part is true -- though the myth claims that it tried to do so by slowing down the typist, which is BS. It tried to do so by making common key-pairs move to non competing typebars.