On Thu, 26 Jan 2023, Steve Lewis via cctalk wrote:
I recently came across the old H.S. yearbook of my grandmother from 1940s,
and it had a report/atrticle of a typing-class (all female; it mentioned
there were two males but they dropped out of the class), and the young
ladies had won a regional contest at a blazing speed of ~20 wpm. I
recall actually using a typewriter long ago, and I recall there being an
implicit speed limit because if you went too fast, the metal hammers would
bind up -- so I imagine in the 1940s the mechanical design of consumer/H.S.
grade typewriters maybe wasn't the best (so 20wpm then maybe was
reasonable).
Half a century ago, professional typists would strive for, and maybe
succeed at 100 WPM.
The IBM selectric mechanism could handle 14.8 characters per second, about
150 WPM. At GSFC, one guy managed to get a selectric terminal up to
about twice that (300 baud?), but soon, the [APL] typeball flew off
across the room. There was some discussion of competing for distance.
I knew a professional typist, working for my book publisher, who, on the
right machines (Linoterm) could average 150 WPM for an 8 hour day. At the
end of the day, she had little or no remembrance of what she had typed.
On conventional consumer Selectrics, she would wear one out in weeks.
I recall looking up the origin of the QWERTY keyboard - a rough beginning
in 1874 but rather refined by 1878, and having essentially the same layout
we have today.
The QWERTY keyboard deliberately limits speed, to avoid lever jams.
I'm not sure if any alternative can really give any
orders-of-magnitude improvement to the average user (in speed or
accuracy). BUT, it's really hard to think outside the box on a 150+ year
old design that's so well accepted by the general public -- like the
pen/pencil, it's still a good intuitive design.
Various arrangements, such as Dvorak, have claimed speed improvements.
But, to use it one needs to first unlearn existing touch-typing skill.
Some chording keyboards show promise. The "Right Hander" from 40 years
ago, was slow. So were the eight buttons on the handlebars of Steve
Robert's bicycle. Five buttons and tilt switches in a handgrip was even
slower. Raw ASCII is not an efficient input mode.
Currently, the fastest is stenographer keyboards, but that requires post
input processing, usually with the original stenographer, to convert from
"shorthand" to words.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
