![]() ![]() But the development of the design wasn't accidental or silly: it was complex, evolutionary, and quite sensible for Morse operators. QWERTY is still an example of technological momentum. That is to say, the lesson of the QWERTY story remains the resilience of a design created for an outmoded technology's dictates. The Kyoto paper suggests that the typewriter keyboard evolved over several years as a direct result of input provided by these telegraph operators. ![]() However, the operators found the alphabetical arrangement to be confusing and inefficient for translating morse code. Early adopters and beta-testers included telegraph operators who needed to quickly transcribe messages. Rather, the QWERTY system emerged as a result of how the first typewriters were being used. They conclude that the mechanics of the typewriter did not influence the keyboard design. ![]() The researchers tracked the evolution of the typewriter keyboard alongside a record of its early professional users. The layout changed often from the early alphabetical arrangement, before the final configuration came into being. Rather, it formed over time as telegraph operators used the machines to transcribe Morse code. The QWERTY keyboard did not spring fully formed from Christopher Sholes, the first person to file a typewriter patent with the layout. But Jimmy Stamp over at Smithsonian points to evidence released by Japanese researchers that, in fact, the story is bunk. So many times, I had assumed it was true. Since then, I've heard this story repeated a thousand times. The modern keyboard, I was told, was a holdover of the mechanical age. You see, in the olden days, mechanical typewriters could jam if people hit the keys too quickly, so they had to put the common letters far apart from each other. That layout was called QWERTY, he explained, and it had been created to slow typists down. Ward took me aside (or maybe he told the whole class, it was a long time ago) to tell me about the wonders of Dvorak, a different keyboard layout that was scientifically designed to be more efficient than the standard layout. The first time I heard the lie, I was in fifth grade. ![]()
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