August Dvorak in the s. More recent research has debunked any claims that Dvorak is more efficient, but it hardly matters. Even in it was already too late for a new system to gain a foothold. It had become truly ubiquitous in countries that used the Latin alphabet.
And this why the new KALQ proposal is so interesting. It attempts to break from the tyranny of Christopher Latham Sholes, whose QWERTY system makes even less sense on the virtual keyboards of tablets and smartphones than it does on a computer keyboards. Is the new KALQ system any different? In some ways, the answer is obviously yes. It has been designed around a very specific, very modern behavior — typing with thumbs.
But it could still be argued that the KALQ system, or any similar system that may be developed in the future, is also a product of path dependency. Because no matter how the letters are arranged, they basic notion of individually separated letters distributed across a grid dates back to Sholes and co.
If you gave an iPad to someone who had never used a keyboard and told them to develop a writing system, chances are they would eventually invent a faster, more intuitive system.
Perhaps a gesture based system based on shorthand? Or some sort of swipe-to-type system? Truly, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Google patents What came first: the typist or the keyboard? Although he sold his designs to Remington early on, he continued to invent improvements and alternatives to the typewriter for the rest of his life, including several keyboard layouts that he determined to be more efficient, such as the following patent, filed by Sholes in , a year before he died, and issued posthumously: U.
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. 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. The modern keyboard, I was told, was a holdover of the mechanical age. Since then, I've heard this story repeated a thousand times.
So many times, I had assumed it was true. But Jimmy Stamp over at Smithsonian points to evidence released by Japanese researchers that, in fact, the story is bunk. Rather, it formed over time as telegraph operators used the machines to transcribe Morse code. The layout changed often from the early alphabetical arrangement, before the final configuration came into being. Read more: Curious Kids: How long would garden snails live if they were not eaten by another animal? Early typewriters were similar.
They had all these levers with a metal alphabet letter at the end of it. You had to press a letter key quite hard to make the metal lever fly across and hit the paper. Hit the A key and the A lever would hit the paper and type A. The paper then shifted a bit to the left, so the next key would hit in just the right place next to the A.
Press more keys and you could type a word, or even a whole book. The first machine had the letter keys in alphabetical order. The trouble was that if you hit two keys quickly the levers would jam. Jams were most likely when the two keys were close together on the keyboard. Rearranging the letters could reduce jams. Christopher Sholes was an American inventor who was most successful in reducing jams. He tried various arrangements, always trying to reduce the need to type two keys that were close together.
He sold his invention to the Remington Company in the United States. In the s, that company built and sold the first commercially successful typewriters.
For years or so after the Remington typewriter arrived, vast numbers of people all over the world trained to become touch typists meaning they could type even without looking much at the keyboard. They were employed to type letters and all other kinds of things for business and government.
Because so many people became so skilled at using QWERTY, it became very difficult to get everyone to change to any other key arrangement. Many other key arrangements have been tried.
0コメント