Dvorak 2 from orangebutton, a weblog by George Girton

Dvorak 2 . . . . . may 18 2003 — ob46.dat

Yesterday we set up the booth at the ICSC (International Council of Shopping Center Developers) in Las Vegas. Drop by, I'll be wearing a purple shirt! This afternoon we are going to be showing our product to customers who want to take a break in their deal making. More than that I cannot tell you, but here's something I can tell you about. How I got my first Dvorak Keyboard.

But what is a Dvorak keyboard? It's just an arrangement of the keys in a way that's easy to type. Dvorak, a careful researcher of typewriting behaviour, got a couple of ten-year grants from the Carnegie Foundation to study typewriting. He took slow motion films of typists fingers, and tried out various different arrangements of the letters. They were all better than the QWERTY keyboard layout, which had been invented sometime in the late 1800's to slow typists down. Machines jammed, and that was the solution.

And in fact, if you ever visit the Lummis Home, just off the Pasadena Freeway in Los Angeles, you can see Lummis's typewriter, which he used in his job as an editor of the Los Angeles Times. It doesn't have anything like a QWERTY or a DVORAK layout. In fact, most of the bottom row reads "HIATENSOR". This is more logical than QWERTYIOUP on the top row.

The Dvorak layout has "AOEUI DHTNS" on the home row, where you rest your fingers: all the common vowels on the weak left hand, and the common consonants on the strong right hand. (Sorry lefties, but maybe your right hand is stronger, too?). Dvorak also created two one-hand layouts, left and right, so that people with only one hand could still be in the typing job market. Top speed for a one-hander? Forty-five words per minute, easily enough to be in the literate workforce.

I think I have blathered on enough for tonight, you will have to tune in tomorrow to see what I did with my IBM model D typewriter.

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