Comment by bigtunacan
2 years ago
Hold up young one. The reason for QWERTYs design has absolutely not been lost to history yet.
The design was to spread out the hammers of the most frequently used letters to reduce the frequency of hammer jamming back when people actually used typewriters and not computers.
The problem it attempted to improve upon, and which is was pretty effective at, is just a problem that no longer exists.
Also apocryphal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY#Contemporaneous_alterna...
And it does a bad job at it, which is further evidence that it was not the design consideration. People may not have been able to run a quick perl script over a few gigabytes of English text, but they would have gotten much closer if that was the desire. I don't believe that was their goal but they were just too stupid to get it even close to right.
> The design was to spread out the hammers of the most frequently used letters to reduce the frequency of hammer jamming
That's a folk myth that's mostly debunked.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fact-of-fiction-...
I’m curious how this works because all the common letters seem to be next to each other on the left side of the keyboard
The original intent I do believe was not separating the hammers per se, but also helping the hands alternate, so they would naturally not jam as much.
However, I use a Dvorak layout and my hands feel like they alternate better on that due to the vowels being all on one hand. The letters are also in more sensical locations, at least for English writing.
It can get annoying when G and C are next to each other, and M and W, but most of the time I type faster on Dvorak than I ever did on Qwerty. It helps that I learned during a time where I used qwerty at work and Dvorak at home, so the mental switch only takes a few seconds now.