Monday, December 18, 2006

Why Qwerty, and What's Better?

If you're curious about where our standard keyboard layout came from, have a look at my paper about its history and what's better. I wrote it for a class, but I promise it's better than typical classwork.

Here is a mirror at Geocities. I wonder if it's time to start paying for web space...

1 comment:

zooplah said...

Personally, I use Dvorak. I never learned how to type on QWERTY and I had heard about how Dvorak is better, so I gave it a whirl and picked it up fairly quickly.

But the "modern layouts" thing seems a bit like the arguments for naturalistic constructed languages over Esperanto. The Idists, Interlinguists, Novialists, et al lament that because Esperanto only has in the ballpark of two million speakers, it's a failure and should be replaced by their language. However, they ignore that their languages have fewer combined speakers than Esperanto has.

However, Dvorak does have the advantage of being an ANSI standard (standardized before QWERTY, BTW).