Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!dino!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!uxa.cso.uiuc.edu!tpmg0848 From: tpmg0848@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (Tom Magliery) Newsgroups: comp.edu Subject: Re: Efficient Keyboards Message-ID: <1990Oct13.231527.6887@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> Date: 13 Oct 90 23:15:27 GMT References: Sender: mag@cs.uiuc.edu Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana Lines: 31 In article freewill@nstar.UUCP (Bill Williston) writes: >Could one of you who lives in an area where efficient keyboards are the >standard put the keys on the screen? I teach wordprocessing and would be >interested in trying a more effiecient letter-layout. Thank you in advance. are keyboards in other countries (that use the same alphabet) really different than ours (except for, i would expect, having keys for all the letters that come with diacritical marks)? i would think not. i hope you're not going to try to market a keyboard with a non-QWERTY layout. it'll never sell. also, if your students are beginning typists, what will they do once they get out of your class and try to type somewhere else? and if your students are *not* beginning typists, are they going to want to learn a different layout? i don't think i would. i'm happy enough with the speed i can manage (~100wpm on text) on (electronic) QWERTY keyboards. it was probably 3 or 4 years after i learned to type before i got to my current level. i wouldn't want to go back to zero. perhaps the improvement would be faster on a different layout, such as the critically-acclaimed (and i believe research-proven-better) dvorak layout. but i think apathy would prevent me from ever bothering. (in fact, i *know* it would, because i've known about dvorak for several years, and never bothered with it.) think about how long americans have gone without switching over to the metric system. yow. they'll *never* switch keyboard layouts. mag -- ____._._...___.....__.__.._..__ Tom Magliery mag@cs.uiuc.edu OR mag@uiuc.edu