On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 11:05:53AM +0100, arne anka wrote: > > With the risk of being completely OT - you all > > know that the QWERTY keyboard was designed for > > the specific purpose of not having the hammers > > of the typewriter clash if you type too fast ? > > There's nothing very ergonomical about them. > > In that perspective, qwerty layouts have been > > legacy since the 70s. > > that's totally nonsense -- and it doesn't get any less preposterous by > permanently repating that myth ...
Quoth Wikipedia -- The QWERTY keyboard layout was devised and created in the early 1870s by Christopher Sholes, a newspaper editor and printer who lived in Milwaukee. With the assistance of his friends Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule he built an early writing machine for which a patent application was filed in October 1867.[3] His "Type Writer" had its printing point located beneath the paper carriage, and so was invisible to the operator. Consequently, the tendency of the typebars to clash and jam if struck in rapid succession was a particularly serious problem, in that the mishap would only be discovered when the typist raised the carriage to inspect what had been typed.[4] Sholes struggled for the next six years to perfect his invention, making many trial-and-error rearrangements of the original machine's alphabetical key arrangement in an effort to reduce the frequency of typebar clashes. Eventually he arrived at a four-row, upper case keyboard approaching the modern QWERTY standard. Yair. _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community