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

Let get straight to the point; i hate qwerty keyboards and to illutrtate one of the reasons, i will not be proffreading this for typograffical errors. another point as to why i hate it so is the fact that i hve just recovered fro mcarple tunnel due to the reduiculous placing of the keys.

contrayr to popula rbelief, it was not designed to slow typists down, rather it was designed to place comon key strokes on opposite sides of the board (ie. it, or, the, of, almost, bother, brother, buy, go, for, time, why, how, hat, do, you get the idea) so that the keys in manuyal typerwriters did not jam. this was in a time when peopel used two fingers on each hand to punch the keys down (both fingers were used on a single key) as they were very hard to push down and it was not necisarry to have a systhem that limited finger movement.

i recently found an alternative to this sub-par (to be nice) system. it is called DVORAK and i would just like to say that it looks much better, one is apperantly able to regain the time taken in learning the new system after only two weeks of using it. if anyone knows how to switch you rsystem,i would like to know.

by the way, i believe tat thaere is a mention of this problem in The Salmon of Doubt, but i will check to make sure.

yeah i have heard about it, my friend someone he knows got one, and he learnt it very quickly, and was typing at some amazingly high speed like 300wpm. deffintly worth buying, i wouldnt mind one.

DVORAK keyboards have been around for a long time, 1932 it was first designed. There was a move in the early eighties to get computer users to adopt DVORAK, but it never took off.

I would take with a pinch of salt the assertion that you can regain the time lost in two weeks by converting to DVORAK. Might work with a two fingered typist, but not with a touch typist which most professional typists are. I would be like learning to type all over again and you don't learnt to touch type in two weeks.

You can convert your existing keyboard to DVORAK simply by installing the appropriate keyboard driver. You will then need to switch the key caps around appropriately.

http://www.dvortyboards.com/about.html

http://ask-leo.com/whats_dvorak_and_why_did_my_keyboard_layout_suddenly_change.html

Donald

Hate to disagree, but I learnt to touch type in two weeks. I didn't do anything else between 9 and 4 each day, mind, and by the end of the two weeks I was only at about 30 wpm, but once you can do it you just get faster and faster, and you never, ever forget.

But 300wpm???? Really??? A good touch typist on a QWERTY keyboard will be around 70 wpm; normal shorthand speed is around 120 wpm I think; and people talk at about 200 wpm (I think that's what they told us at college). 300 wpm must be about the speed of Einstein thinking or racing commentators gabbling.

What keyboards do court and parliamentary clerks use? They must go faster than ordinary mortals.

Mol

Well if you are going to do eight hours a day for two weeks you probably will learn to touch type in two week. When I was learning to type, I had other things to learn at the same time. Even so, change the key and you wold have to start all over again.

300 wpm is a bit optimistic considering the World Record is 212wpm and that was on a modified DAVORAK keyboard. 120 wpm would be nearer the norm for a normal person.

http://sominfo.syr.edu/facstaff/dvorak/blackburn.html

Court and parliamentary clerks don't type in full like you and I would. They use stenography which is the posh name of shorthand. In courts they use a shorthand equivalent, but on a keyboard instead of writing it. Consequently they appear to be typing as fast as a person can speak. What they produce then needs to be transcribed into ordinary text later.

Donald

i learnt to och type when I was in journalism training and i think now ti would take quite awhile to train my fingers if i used a different keyboard....
you are very right about stenography .I belive thats the same with Hansard too.

Slight aside: Changing the keyboard settings on the PC of an unsuspecting person from QWERTY to DVORAK can be very amusing.

mr Dreadful! And you from such a nice family! I'm aghast

Thank you Donald The learning-to-type experience was combined with shorthand, but we did concentrate mostly on typing to start off with because it was considered we couldn't do anything else useful until we'd mastered it. We were also taught to proofread to 100% accuracy on-screen when wordprocessing (in the exam we had six sheets of paper for 4 pieces of work, and you would fail if you made more than 2 errors) but I'm a bit lax about that now.

My sister once took all the keys off my father's typewriter and rearranged them into alphabetical order. He was not amused.

My physics teacher invented a new keyboard for faster one-fingered typing (he was a far-sighted man: this was 20 years ago and the use he had in mind for it was similar to texting on mobile phones). It was a 5 x 5 grid (with one letter on its own) and the position of the letters was to do with how you would write them - so letters with tails down were on the bottom row, and generally letters you start writing on the left were on the lefthand side ... and so on. He was informed that it was a useless idea because the qwerty keyboard was too well-established and only trained typists would be using that sort of technology

Mol

<>

Capital! The country needs more ghasts.

Re-arranging keys it a cruel trick - but it can be fun. I once rearranged the keys on the keyboard of a secure computer system when I was in the Army. Caused quite a bit of bother as one the keys was for the guys password and he kept getting locked out.

When he did it for the third time it stared ringing alarm bells as the it looked as if someone was trying to break into the computer. When no one was looking I re-arranged the keys and just kept quiet. They never did work out why this particular terminal kept getting locked out.

>> only trained typists would be using that sort of technology <<

Now the world and his dog is using it. As bad as Bill Gates saying he couldn't imagine any circumstances where you would need more than 650 kbts of memory in a desktop computer.

Donald

How would having a DVORAK rather than a QWERTY keyboard have avoided one getting carpal tunnel syndrome?

I got a variant of that but it was a lazy/poor typing style that did it, not the keyboard layout.

Keep your wrists in the air or use a cushion. Simple to avoid then.

>> The country needs more ghasts.<<

Better than being a lert I suppose.

"Slight aside: Changing the keyboard settings on the PC of an unsuspecting person from QWERTY to DVORAK can be very amusing."

i never thought of this. i have however used the auto correct function on word to acheive a similar end (switch the words "I" and "a" to "your mother is a badger" and "spandex and mullets are freaking sexxxy" respectivly on a computer at work and people get embarrased very quickly).


as for carple tunnel, i heard that DVORAK can reduce finger movement by something like 70%, so you would have to type close to twice as long per day to get it (my doctor recomended changing anyway).

fair enough.