From: utzoo!decvax!genrad!linus!allegra!eagle!harpo!floyd!cmcl2!philabs!seismo!hao!hplabs!hansen
Newsgroups: net.followup
Title: Re: keyboard setup
Article-I.D.: hplabs.1412
Posted: Thu May  5 10:53:39 1983
Received: Fri May 13 20:06:07 1983
References: burl.136

Relay-Version:version B 3/9/83; site harpo.UUCP
Message-ID:<1412@hplabs.UUCP>
Date:Thu, 5-May-83 10:53:39 EDT

Linotype machines do not have the awful QWERTY keyboard, and never did.
Good old Ottmar Mergenthaler designed the keyboard to have the most
heavily used letters on the upper left of the keyboard arra, with
lower case letters on the left, upper case in the center, and
special characters on the right.  It takes quite a while for the
matrices (little pieces of brass exactly the width of the character,
with the character embossed in it) to travel from the top of the machine
in little hoppers, down a long chute, and get registered into a line,
but the whole process is pipelined.  Having a consistent typing rhythm
probably helped though.

For the more pictorially-minded, the keyboard was arranged something like:

    e  s  x  x  x  E  S  X  X  X
    t  h  x  x  x  T  H  X  X  X
    a  r  x  x  x  A  R  X  X  X   (and special
    i  d  x  x  x  I  D  X  X  X    characters over here...)
    o  l  x  x  x  O  L  X  X  X
    n  u  x  x  x  N  U  X  X  X

Has anyone ever seen a few lines of "etaionshrdlu etaionshrdlu" in the
middle of newspaper articles?  It's produced by running one's fingers
down the first two rows of the Linotype machine.

That QWERTY layout sure does keep those electrons from jamming up
in my keyboard....

Craig Hansen
HP Labs