Tangentially related but there is a recent Radiolabs podcast about "The Wubi Effect" and it's a very interesting listen. The Chinese market also uses QWERTY (which surprised me), and they enter text using a variety of coding tactics. The government pushed method is called pinyin and is basically phonetic and was a way to try to standardize pronunciation. The Wubi method is basically building the shape components of the character set.
Anyways, fascinating to learn. Somehow didn't realize that so much of the world also uses QWERTY.
One fun theory is that layout purposefully included letters for the word "Typewriter" in the top row (even when fingers are on the home row). This made it an easy selling point: "see how easy it is to type the name of the object?"
What a useless article, especially given the title. Here's all they have to say about the layout:
There’s some dispute over how and why Sholes and Glidden arrived at the QWERTY layout. Some historians have argued that it solved a jamming problem by spacing out the most common letters in English; others, particularly more recent historians, hold that it was designed specifically to help telegraphists avoid common errors when transcribing Morse code. Regardless, after around 30 test models, Sholes and Glidden settled on QWERTY—and changed the world.
I disagree. When I have a question, I am prepared for the answer to have some amount of ambiguity, especially when it comes to historical questions of the format "why is X", "how did X originate", etc. If I were trying to choose a descriptive name for an article, the question that it researches is a reasonable choice. Combined then, I am happy with the article's content given its title, and I am happy with the information it delivered to me without my having to do my own research. I don't feel that this is clickbait, nor do I feel qualified to assert that their conclusion is wrong.
Yes, and like many I've heard the anti-jamming explanation (contra the slow typists down one), so I actually find it interesting that this is a somewhat unsettled question.
>> There’s some dispute over how and why Sholes and Glidden arrived at the QWERTY layout.
Well at least it says who came up with it and when, so we know who to blame for it. None of the common suggestions make sense to me. It might be useful to examine the design of their first model now that we know who made it.
I learned to type on a Corona typewriter and it would jam when the key metal arms (or whatever the name was) came from the opposite side. The arm coming from the left side leaving too slow and bam! the arm from the right side comes smashing the other arm. My guess then was that the letters were put in some fashion that the group of letters coming from the right side seldom where adjacent from the group of letters coming from the left side. The closer the arms where to the center of the typewriter the less they would travel hence faster going in and out and beneficial for the letters to be adjacent, for the English language of course.
ETAOIN SHRDLU
The 10 most common letters in the English language. With exception of the A, all towards the center of keyboard.
L is the opposite position to A, so also an edge letter.
I too learnt to type in part on a mechanical typewriter keyboard -- there was a TV kids show about journalists and I wanted to mimic them I think. IME (a long time ago) you wanted to have consecutive keys on opposite hands because it took the whole hand moving to provide a good force to move the key and impact the ribbon hard enough to make a good print of the letter. But then, as you said, you would occassionally get the type arms locking up. I definitely couldn't use my pinky to type on that keyboard.
TH, ER, ON, AN are the most common letter pairs [in British English]; TH is good on a QWERTY but the other pairs are not particularly well placed I think.
It’s interesting how we play the most advanced video games on a peripheral from 1870. Zero innovation on that front, and worse, we’re going even further backward with the mechanical keyboard obsession.
The reason we had to go backwards to mechanical keyboards is that modern keyboards were being built just for lower prices with no regard to feel or longevity.
Sometimes things don't need innovation. If you don't want to play with a keyboard there's always controllers (that also seem to have found a pretty stable form the last years)
I have a mechanical keyboard on my main desktop system. But I have to admit that, given the amount of typing I do on short-throw (non-butterfly) MacBook keyboards, I'm not sure I really have a clear preference at this point.
(And there's something to be said more generally for the keyboards you use day to day not being radically different from most other keyboards you'll encounter.)
>we’re going even further backward with the mechanical keyboard obsession
Well, not quite; single-stage/two-stage trigger technology, as well as progressive triggers, have some benefits when applied to keyboards.
First, single-stage/two-stage triggers give you (with single-stage) a single smooth press with activation point somewhere in the middle, or (with two-stage) a consistent amount of takeup then a wall that you have to break through to activate the mechanism. So you can have the key pressed and resting on the activation point, and then press it the rest of the way when you want the input to register (for instance, if you're in a game and are waiting for someone to peek around the corner).
Second, progressive triggers, where pressing a little way registers a single input and pressing it all the way down/back types something fully-automatically. They're still mostly useless because the manufacturers refuse to put properly heavy springs in the switches, but the technology itself is ready for this.
It's certainly strange that it took 70 years from the implementations of these ideas in firearms to today's keyboards given the advantages of each mechanism are equally applicable to both, but that's the way it happened.
First, single-stage/two-stage triggers give you (with single-stage) a single smooth press with activation point somewhere in the middle, or (with two-stage) a consistent amount of takeup then a wall that you have to break through to activate the mechanism. So you can have the key pressed and resting on the activation point, and then press it the rest of the way when you want the input to register (for instance, if you're in a game and are waiting for someone to peek around the corner).
This is a cool thing, I’d want that on my mouse triggers also. The problem is that in practice it’ll never be what we want it to be because the distance of switches is too small to make that two stage thing be a thing (we’d need super heavy switches for this to be a thing). Now imagine mouse clicks which are supposed to represent a trigger (we operate as if everything is a hair trigger).
Burst/Single burst is mostly a timing thing at this point. Would be interesting to see it become a force based thing.
>Now imagine mouse clicks which are supposed to represent a trigger.
Interestingly, some consoles already do this- the PS5 in particular will vary the weight of its shoulder triggers to match what you're doing on screen.
>we’d need super heavy switches for this to be a thing
It continuously surprises me that none of the Hall effect keyboard makers (Wooting, Drunkdeer, and... I think Steelseries and Corsair have some as well) don't offer ultra-high-weight springs as at least an option for this reason.
Interestingly, there's another keyboard manufacturer, Roli, who makes a board that has some very interesting modes of input (as they accept inputs of variable pressure, give you the ability to slide smoothly between keys, and vary the kind of input from each key by shaking your fingers). Of course, that's not a computer keyboard, but it's still a glimpse into the kinds of interesting input devices we could make if only we bothered to do so.
> even further backward with the mechanical keyboard obsession
My impression has been that, along with 3D printing, the mechanical keyboard obsession has has spurred a renaissance of keyboard innovation in the last decade or so.
You can now buy keyboards or kits with ortholinear/columnar keys, split hands, built-in displays, modes/layers, non-QWERTY layouts, Hall effect keys, non-uniform resistance, and more.
I haven't seen this degree of keyboard innovation in a long time. The best part is that they're an order of magnitude cheaper than the wacky keyboards of the 1980s and 1990s, many of which cost thousands of dollars. These days you can try something innovative out for just a few hundred bucks and even less if you're willing to solder it yourself.
In the home computer era we rarely played on the keyboard, Joysticks were ubiquitous. Playing action games on the keyboard gained only in popularity with the rise of the PC and roughly at the same time game pads displaced the Joystick, which was relegated to the flight similator niche.
And the serious simulator niche, including flight, became really niche to the point where the controllers (joysticks, wheels) used for that niche largely went away.
My memory is pre-PC keyboards were such crap to play on. And to type on too. It’s hard to tell now if PCs started the keyboard era or PC keyboards started the PC era in this regard.
I wouldn't call the keyboards bad per se, though. Of course there were some terrible ones, like the one on the ZX Spectrum, but most of them (like Commodore and Atari) were quite good even by todays standards. Especially build quality and materials were better than in the majority of keyboards today. Many of these old keyboards don't cause problems even after more than 40 years.
They were not suitable for gaming because they were not made for it. I'd even say they were not particularly suited for typing either.
In the 80s many people still learned typing on real typewriters which had crazy long key travel, considerable force required to press and bottoming out was part of the whole idea. Instead of doing what is ergonomically right, early keyboards chose to mimic typewriters to avoid alienating early users.
That is in my opinion the main reason why they were not used for action games.
The keyboard... in some ways it sucks, but in other ways. the thing has 100 buttons. that kind of kicks ass, but what I want to talk about is the mouse.
The mouse for first person games was stroke of genius.... no wait what am I talking about it was a huge fluke. if you asked any one to design a controller for a first person game. absolutely no one would design a mouse. the fact that a thing designed as a proxy for touch screens due to hardware limitations works so well at the task is amazing. Actually come to think about it the mouse is in many ways better than touch screens. The big disadvantage is that you have to work remotely, but this is easily learned. but now not only do you not have anything(your huge mitt) obscuring the screen, the touch zone can become very precise and it allow for much more touch dexterity with multiple buttons. touch screens do allow for multi finger gestures but these are area not point controls. On the whole I would say the mouse wins, that is. in the cases where you can put a mouse down.
Perhaps if they put the touch screen on the back of the phone, and added a few side buttons for touch dexterity. And we might have unicorns. It would be too hard a sell, to the wrong audience. touch screens work well enough... but they could be so much better.
Touch screens are okay when under a thumb. But imagine raising your hand whole day to poke a screen, how disproportional your shoulders would grow and how early you’d become orthopedists regular. But on the bright side, we’d use CLIs and cursor based UIs much more.
I hate touch screens as much, if not more, than the next guy. But gorilla arm is the stupidest, weakest argument against them.
Think of people who have jobs where they have to work for hours in front of them. the human body is good at this, it does not turn out to be super tiring. It is a made up problem.
The QWERTY layout has a funny difference with for instance the french AZERTY layout. On an AZERTY keyboard, the parentheses () are directly accessible whereas the square brackets [] are not. On a QWERTY keyboard, this is the opposite : you need SHIFT for the parentheses () but not for the square brackets []. I've always wondered why the QWERTY layout favored the square brackets over the parentheses. Naively, parentheses are more common and should be more easily accessible...
I’ve always set up a custom keyboard for exactly that! () on their own keys, [] on shift and {} above 0 and 9. It always struck me as the most natural alignment for prose and programming.
Thankfully between Ukelele [0] and MSKLC [1] it’s pleasantly simple to do
And if anyone wants to go really custom, it's worth checking out the QMK firmware supported by many mechanical keyboards. Aside from the level of customisation made possible by QMK, another benefit is that everything lives on the keyboard - no need to install keyboard profiles on each machine you might connect the keyboard to.
The best research I've seen on this is the paper "On the Prehistory of QWERTY" [1] which has a great figure on the fourth page with the presumable original prototype showing all the consonants wrapping around alphabetically and the vowels on the top row.
45 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadAnyways, fascinating to learn. Somehow didn't realize that so much of the world also uses QWERTY.
Virtually all the spellings of names from mainland China that you’re familiar with (e.g., Xi Jinping) are written in Pinyin.
There’s some dispute over how and why Sholes and Glidden arrived at the QWERTY layout. Some historians have argued that it solved a jamming problem by spacing out the most common letters in English; others, particularly more recent historians, hold that it was designed specifically to help telegraphists avoid common errors when transcribing Morse code. Regardless, after around 30 test models, Sholes and Glidden settled on QWERTY—and changed the world.
Then the vowels were moved to the top row These letters still fit that pattern eyuio adfghjkl mnvxz
I and O were near 9 and 8 because they were also used as 1 and 0 to save keys, and people wanted to type 1870 etc easily.
A was swapped back to the middle row for ease of use, everything else was pretty much to avoid patents of other layouts
QWERTY stuck because typing classes were invented and they first used QWERTY
Well at least it says who came up with it and when, so we know who to blame for it. None of the common suggestions make sense to me. It might be useful to examine the design of their first model now that we know who made it.
ETAOIN SHRDLU
The 10 most common letters in the English language. With exception of the A, all towards the center of keyboard.
I too learnt to type in part on a mechanical typewriter keyboard -- there was a TV kids show about journalists and I wanted to mimic them I think. IME (a long time ago) you wanted to have consecutive keys on opposite hands because it took the whole hand moving to provide a good force to move the key and impact the ribbon hard enough to make a good print of the letter. But then, as you said, you would occassionally get the type arms locking up. I definitely couldn't use my pinky to type on that keyboard.
TH, ER, ON, AN are the most common letter pairs [in British English]; TH is good on a QWERTY but the other pairs are not particularly well placed I think.
Sometimes things don't need innovation. If you don't want to play with a keyboard there's always controllers (that also seem to have found a pretty stable form the last years)
(And there's something to be said more generally for the keyboards you use day to day not being radically different from most other keyboards you'll encounter.)
Well, not quite; single-stage/two-stage trigger technology, as well as progressive triggers, have some benefits when applied to keyboards.
First, single-stage/two-stage triggers give you (with single-stage) a single smooth press with activation point somewhere in the middle, or (with two-stage) a consistent amount of takeup then a wall that you have to break through to activate the mechanism. So you can have the key pressed and resting on the activation point, and then press it the rest of the way when you want the input to register (for instance, if you're in a game and are waiting for someone to peek around the corner).
Second, progressive triggers, where pressing a little way registers a single input and pressing it all the way down/back types something fully-automatically. They're still mostly useless because the manufacturers refuse to put properly heavy springs in the switches, but the technology itself is ready for this.
It's certainly strange that it took 70 years from the implementations of these ideas in firearms to today's keyboards given the advantages of each mechanism are equally applicable to both, but that's the way it happened.
This is a cool thing, I’d want that on my mouse triggers also. The problem is that in practice it’ll never be what we want it to be because the distance of switches is too small to make that two stage thing be a thing (we’d need super heavy switches for this to be a thing). Now imagine mouse clicks which are supposed to represent a trigger (we operate as if everything is a hair trigger).
Burst/Single burst is mostly a timing thing at this point. Would be interesting to see it become a force based thing.
Fun ideas though.
Interestingly, some consoles already do this- the PS5 in particular will vary the weight of its shoulder triggers to match what you're doing on screen.
>we’d need super heavy switches for this to be a thing
It continuously surprises me that none of the Hall effect keyboard makers (Wooting, Drunkdeer, and... I think Steelseries and Corsair have some as well) don't offer ultra-high-weight springs as at least an option for this reason.
Interestingly, there's another keyboard manufacturer, Roli, who makes a board that has some very interesting modes of input (as they accept inputs of variable pressure, give you the ability to slide smoothly between keys, and vary the kind of input from each key by shaking your fingers). Of course, that's not a computer keyboard, but it's still a glimpse into the kinds of interesting input devices we could make if only we bothered to do so.
My impression has been that, along with 3D printing, the mechanical keyboard obsession has has spurred a renaissance of keyboard innovation in the last decade or so.
You can now buy keyboards or kits with ortholinear/columnar keys, split hands, built-in displays, modes/layers, non-QWERTY layouts, Hall effect keys, non-uniform resistance, and more.
I haven't seen this degree of keyboard innovation in a long time. The best part is that they're an order of magnitude cheaper than the wacky keyboards of the 1980s and 1990s, many of which cost thousands of dollars. These days you can try something innovative out for just a few hundred bucks and even less if you're willing to solder it yourself.
I wouldn't call the keyboards bad per se, though. Of course there were some terrible ones, like the one on the ZX Spectrum, but most of them (like Commodore and Atari) were quite good even by todays standards. Especially build quality and materials were better than in the majority of keyboards today. Many of these old keyboards don't cause problems even after more than 40 years.
They were not suitable for gaming because they were not made for it. I'd even say they were not particularly suited for typing either.
In the 80s many people still learned typing on real typewriters which had crazy long key travel, considerable force required to press and bottoming out was part of the whole idea. Instead of doing what is ergonomically right, early keyboards chose to mimic typewriters to avoid alienating early users.
That is in my opinion the main reason why they were not used for action games.
The mouse for first person games was stroke of genius.... no wait what am I talking about it was a huge fluke. if you asked any one to design a controller for a first person game. absolutely no one would design a mouse. the fact that a thing designed as a proxy for touch screens due to hardware limitations works so well at the task is amazing. Actually come to think about it the mouse is in many ways better than touch screens. The big disadvantage is that you have to work remotely, but this is easily learned. but now not only do you not have anything(your huge mitt) obscuring the screen, the touch zone can become very precise and it allow for much more touch dexterity with multiple buttons. touch screens do allow for multi finger gestures but these are area not point controls. On the whole I would say the mouse wins, that is. in the cases where you can put a mouse down.
Perhaps if they put the touch screen on the back of the phone, and added a few side buttons for touch dexterity. And we might have unicorns. It would be too hard a sell, to the wrong audience. touch screens work well enough... but they could be so much better.
Think of people who have jobs where they have to work for hours in front of them. the human body is good at this, it does not turn out to be super tiring. It is a made up problem.
Thankfully between Ukelele [0] and MSKLC [1] it’s pleasantly simple to do
[0] for macOS: https://software.sil.org/ukelele/ [1] for Windows: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=102...
You are comparing your English QWERTY, with the French AZERTY, but there are many more languages QWERTY.
On the Italian keyboard (which is also QWERTY) the round brackets need Shift, but the square ones need AltGR.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Selectric
I also created a layout to use my old Dvorak keyboard on Windows: https://github.com/edpichler/Apple-Dvorak-on-Windows
It works with my mechanical keychron and, I believe, with any other similar Dvorak keyboard.
[1] https://repository.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2433...