h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

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It is indeed! Thanks, Edward.

I've seen Chinese students typing Cantonese/Mandarin on an alpha-numeric keyboard. They use shortcuts, I'm told - a+e gives a character etc. It's laborious, and the keyboard has to be configured for it - as was the case in the labs at my polytech. But some of them are quite fast..

The story of the QWERTY keyboard is partially told here: A1125361 but isn't there more? I have heard that there was a public competition in New York at the end of the 19th cetury, which the qwerty inventor (Sholes) won "because he had the best-trained typist".

There's more here: http://home.earthlink.net/%7Edcrehr/whyqwert.html and a discussion of the relative merits of different key layouts here: http://wwwpub.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html with a quote from a study saying "For the expert typist, the layout of keys makes surprisingly little difference. There seems no reason to choose Sholes, Dvorak. or alphabetically organized keyboards over one another on the basis of typing speed. It is possible to make a bad keyboard layout . . ."

Interesting stuff. Those docs support the view I have always held, that the QWERTY key arrangement was designed to maximise typing speed. Another view I've held is that the factors which were considered important in 1936 on manual typewriters (weakness of the fingers of the left hand) are unimportant on modern keyboards.

...that is speed up typing by slowing down the typists so that the keys didn't jam!

Dvorak keyboards are sometimes cited as being 'ergonomically superior'. Yes - they would yield slightly faster typing speeds. However - the gains over a working day would be negligible, since no worker's job should be designed so that it consists of constant, protracted keyboard entry. (Yes, many jobs *are* still like that - in breach of EU regulations). However - in terms of health and safety, the lesser finger travel for Dvorak would be of no benefit. Far more important are correct posture, proper support for the arms, appropriate rest breaks and exercise, etc. etc.

On the topic of keyboard entry in general...we have moved from a context in which typing was a specialist (if low-paid) skill to one in which any monkey does it - mainly in autodidactic 'hunt and peck' styles. In WP packages, the untrained are assisted by various error correction gizmos and are nowadays expected to produce documents with an accuracy and typographic quality which far exceeds that produced by old-time typing pools. On the other hand - we also use typing as a primary mode of communication using software which lacks error correction. Here, mistakes are the exception rather than the rule (and I am the worst offender!)

Question: In spoken communication, we are tolerant of all sorts of 'mistakes' - elisions, hesitancies, incomplete sentences. We hardly notice them. But in a context such as a hootoo conversation, to what extent are my awful typos and laziness over proofreading a barrier to communication?

>>...that is speed up typing by slowing down the typists so that the keys didn't jam!

No. The arrangement was not designed to slow down the typists. It was designed to minimise jamming and therefore speed up the typists. The typists will always type as fast as it is physically possible to type, never mind the arrangement.

Ah, yes. Quite correct. They made sure that frequently-occuring letter pairs were not adjacent.

What were those keyboards called which allowed one-handed alphanumeric entry by making letters from a combination of finger strokes, as per a chord? (Can't resists the obvious comment about them being dead handy for internet 'adult' chat)

I remember the keyboards, but I don't remember what they were called. I must have been thinking about something else at the time.

Adelaide, I think, although I may be wrong, that all of the Chinese dialects are written pretty much exactly the same, because the writing was brought in from the top rather than having evolved, and the differences across provinces are in how they say the words, which can be markedly different.

Because its such a concise language, I expect that despite having to muck about selecting a character by the radicals or however its done (I think its more or less the same system used in the dictionaries), they can probably type a sentence very quickly.

Oh, and while we're on linguistics, a mention to the Chinese (and possibly other places around there?) counting system that lets you count up to 100 on your fingers, very useful for haggling prices.

Gottit!
http://www.nifty.demon.co.uk/odd/mw/

Thanks for that reference - I knew what you meant, but just couldn't bring it to mind.

Your discussions also brought to my mind a device called a palantype (in the UK, I think it is/was called something else in the US), which is used for taking verbatim records, especially in a courtroom. Combinations of keys, known as chords, represented syllables, and a trained palantypist could keep up with courtroom dialogue.

I believe it was also used by the BBC (long time ago) to subtitle live broadcasts. The syllables as keyed were phonetic in nature, which sometimes led to ambiguity, particularly with homophones. An example I saw was during a broadcast of some royal occasion (wedding of Prince Charles to Diana, maybe?), one of the first live broadcasts to be subtitled in this way, where the queen (I think) she was described as "raining over her people", or something similar.

Try
http://verbatimreporting.co.uk/how_verbatim_reporting_works.htm

for more information.

Stenograph / stenographer.

http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi719.htm

re qwerty origins. I've read the essay by SJ Gould but can't quite remember all the details. I think he made a point about getting a foothold in an ecosyttem (or marketplace) to be successful. Or summit.

>> ..to what extent are my awful typos and laziness over proofreading a barrier to communication? <<

Six times seven.

But perhaps I should ask you to define barrier (which has all sorts of Les Miserables value-added obfuscation) and communication (which implies that blame should be shared on the receiving end).


~jwf~

In a conversation like this it is good manners to overlook obvious typos particularly taking into account the time of night in the zone of the poster

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Not in your case, Edward, they're not, and not in the case of most people here. *Some* however, are so dreadfully unreadable (at least two on purpose, as they have stated) that I find them so hard to read, that I have to know what they say is worth reading before I'll bother.

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I remember seeing those things in thousands of American courtroom dramas from when I were a lass.. Fascinating! (Yes, I do recall the discussion about that word - my niece just emailed me a picture of a naked Brad Pitt!)

"my niece just emailed me a picture of a naked Brad Pitt!"

No need to apologise, Adelaide, your posting is quite coherent.

This was actually developed into a viable product, which I bought just before going to Uni http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~len/boog/gifs/ag500.jpg I never really used it though. Still have it somewhere buried at home if anyone's interested...

I think like the Apple Newton, it was an ideas just slightly before it's time - the PDA/Palm type devices really took off about 2 years later, alas the company had already gone bust.

These days surely any new keyboard would be based more on the telephone keypad model, as SMS has become so pervasive. There are flaws with that though, but like the QWERTY layout now everyone is using/familiar with it it will be an uphill struggle for any new version to come to market.

Although I did see a revolutionary new design concept earlier this week - well actually it's more of a tweak to the existing pattern (but I can see the huge improvements), which was also designed to help those with dyslexia to spell. However, that isn't launching until next year, so there aren't any pictures of it around on the web, unfortunately. The chap who is marketing it has failed to interest the big phone companies though, so whether it will actually become estabilished is not certain.