Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!motcsd!dms!albaugh
From: albaugh@dms.UUCP (Mike Albaugh)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Urban Legends (was Re: Dvorak Keyboard Layout)
Message-ID: <787@dms.UUCP>
Date: 19 Jul 89 16:09:17 GMT
References: <66814@yale-celray.yale.UUCP>
Organization: Atari Games Inc., Milpitas, CA
Lines: 27

From article <66814@yale-celray.yale.UUCP>, by Horne-Scott@cs.yale.edu 
(Scott Horne):
> Yes, QWERTY was designed to slow down typists to prevent them from jamming
> the machines.  (It doesn't fulfill that purpose, though:  I can jam a manual
> typewriter.)  Oddly enough, some keys very often pressed in sequence are
> located next to each other (_e.g._, `e' and `r', `i' and `o').

	So where did this particular urban legend start. That is, can anyone
post a specific reference by someone who _knows_ (Scholes or one of his
contemporaries) that explicitely states that the QWERTY keyboard was designed
to slow down typists. I saw a book review of a book by someone at Bell Labs
that mentioned, off hand, de-bunking this particular myth, but it seems to
be as resilient as the one about the poodle in the microwave.

> So why aren't we all typing on Dvorak keyboards today, now that we have
> computer terminals that don't ``jam''?  Old habits die hard....  Alas,
> alack....

	You have obviously never used CPM on a low-budget system, if you think
computer keyboards don't "jam" :-)

					Mike

| Mike Albaugh (albaugh@dms.UUCP || {...decwrl!turtlevax!}weitek!dms!albaugh)
| Atari Games Corp (Arcade Games, no relation to the makers of the ST)
| 675 Sycamore Dr. Milpitas, CA 95035		voice: (408)434-1709
| The opinions expressed are my own (Boy, are they ever)