Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs
by Ken Kocienda · 3 Sep 2018 · 255pp · 76,834 words
people to think more about their typing and less about futzing with the touchscreen and the user interface. Here was my concept: a big-key QWERTY keyboard that displayed multiple letters per key but that offloaded the decision of picking the letters to the computer. No more swipes or slides. Typing a
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typist. Once I banished the hardwired key groupings, the design choice Phil Schiller didn’t like, I had something that looked more like a standard QWERTY keyboard. For the typist, all the keys shrank in size, as compared to the derby-winning keyboard, as shown on the left. The autocorrection software saw
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“aluminum” no longer meant getting slimy. The new single-key QWERTY design provided the definitive solution to the “Where am I?” problem. The single-letter QWERTY keyboard really was better. Greg Christie was right. Within a few days after making this change, I no longer had a pile of problems with no
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wouldn’t get lost in the middle of words. Even so, solving these lingering problems revealed the next issue, a subtle behavior about the new QWERTY keyboard and the space bar. From the start of my investigations into providing active dictionary assistance, I aimed my user interface and technical designs at helping
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to choose the word for you when you tapped space. When I switched away from this automatic-word-choosing on the Greg-inspired, single-letter QWERTY keyboard, tapping space now entered the exact characters you typed, the ones you saw pop up as you tapped. Dictionary suggestions continued to be visible in
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one letter on every key. Tapping space gave you the letters you typed. Since everyone on the Purple development team was living on my new QWERTY keyboard every day, the feedback came back to me loud and clear. It was too hard to build up typing speed. The keys were too small
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for kicks, I agreed. He left my office, I wrote some code, and in about a half hour, I had a new demo of the QWERTY keyboard, one that automatically picked the best dictionary word suggestion when you tapped space. I called Richard back into my office. He picked up the Wallaby
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points about taste warrants some discussion. I’ll look at them in order, viewing each through the lens of empathy, and I’ll use the QWERTY keyboard as the main example. First, there’s developing judgment. We all know what it’s like to have a literal knee-jerk reaction and the
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of QWERTY means that people are familiar with it. Consider the Giggly Demo with Richard. Since he knew where all the letters were on a QWERTY keyboard, he could come into my office, pick up the Wallaby, and pound out the words he wanted without thinking about it. QWERTY tapped into decades
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that this entire cycle removed the arbitrariness from taste. It gave taste a purpose, a rationale beyond self-indulgence, an empathetic end. So, is the QWERTY keyboard a pleasing and integrated whole? Is it well balanced and justifiably likable? Is it a design that works? The intervening years have provided the answer
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. The autocorrecting QWERTY keyboard did not sink the iPhone as a product, as did the disappointing handwriting recognition on the Newton. The opposite happened. Two-thumb typing on a
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. It’s the default for mobile devices. Even so, popularity doesn’t equal excellence. A better justification is that people can type on a smartphone QWERTY keyboard without thinking about it. The keyboard can melt away, it can recede, and when it does, it leaves a space for what people really care
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the ground. See you soon.” These countless trivial but touching human moments are enabled by technology and made possible, in some small part, by a QWERTY keyboard. * * * Forgive me for jumping ahead in the story. It’s time to return to the immediate aftermath of the decision to turn on full-time
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, and I had to carefully adjust the values of similarly spelled words, especially those words with letters that are close to each other on the QWERTY keyboard, like “tune” and “time.” Since missing words like “freckles” could lead to absurd mistakes, I also reviewed the dictionary for its coverage of the most
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, I had no idea how to make useful algorithms to assist people with text entry. Even when I had progressed through to the single-letter QWERTY keyboard layout, my autocorrection code was still extremely simple. It worked something like the tumblers on a bike lock. If you meant to type the word
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that popped up, and considering the letters in the neighborhood of the popped-up key. Since the letter D is close to F on the QWERTY keyboard, the code could autocorrect from colf to cold. The algorithm created an arrangement of tumblers corresponding to the keys you typed and the letters close
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. It also was a good solution when all of us on the Purple team were novices with touchscreen typing. Months later, when the single-letter QWERTY keyboard layout replaced the derby-winning design, and everyone started making more typing errors per word since the keys were so much smaller, the simple tumbler
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couldn’t solve in favor of those he could. So, that’s what I did. I started by imagining a picture of my single-letter QWERTY keyboard, and I made a guess about the way I might miss a key I was aiming for. I supposed that if I wanted to tap
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a refined sense of judgment and finding the balance that produces a pleasing and integrated whole, as when we made the choice to offer a QWERTY keyboard layout for the iPhone Empathy, which means trying to see the world from other people’s perspectives and creating work that fits into their lives
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demonstrated his expert-level craft. When Greg Christie said, “Aww . . . come on, Ken!” to urge me to put one letter on each key for the QWERTY keyboard, it was one of the most decisive moments in my career. Continued diligence was necessary to build the autocorrection dictionary for the iPhone, adding all
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-target game? How much decisiveness did it take for Greg Christie to declare that I should go back to single letters per key for the QWERTY keyboard? Such questions miss the point: We tried to be tasteful and collaborative and diligent and mindful of craft and the rest in all the things
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?title=QWERTY&oldid=842348998. Accessed May 14, 2018. 4. Samantha, Today I Found Out, “The Origin of the Qwerty Keyboard,” January 7, 2012. http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/01/the-origin-of-the-qwerty-keyboard/. Accessed May 14, 2018. 5. Wikipedia contributors, “Critique of Judgment,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia
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Apple Way and, 251 definition of, 4, 182, 248 essential element of success, 4, 5, 248–249 likability and, 185 Purple project (iPhone) and, 159 QWERTY keyboard and, 182–189 slide-to-unlock control and, 249 error messages, 73–74, 78–79 essential elements of Apple’s software success, 3–5, 247
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product-killing potential and, 160 QuickType, 235n QWERTY, 146–148, 172–189, 196–197, 199–200, 248–249 as “science project,” 8–9 single-letter QWERTY keyboard, 172–176 taste and, 182–187 thumb-typing, 8, 139–141, 144, 151, 178, 185, 189, 235 touchscreen text entry, 159–190 Keynote (app), 26
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, 240, 247 Pages (app), 119 pattern skew algorithm, 203–206, 234, 243–244 pinch to zoom, 257 Platform Experience, 47 pop-ups, 175, 175n, 201 QWERTY keyboard, 146–148, 172–189, 196–197, 199–200, 248–249 Radar (bug tracking program), 210–211, 253 reality distortion field (RDF), 27 release dates, 211
Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Writing Science)
by Thierry Bardini · 1 Dec 2000
way people are able to labor, but a fundamental improve- ment in the way people, as people, "work." CHAPTER TWO The Chord Keyset and the QWERTY Keyboard Man must, in order to operate his instruments skillfully, internalize aspects of them in the form of kinesthetic and perceptual habits. In that sense at
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appraisal of all the likely "candidates for change" in the H-LAM/T system, "the Human using Language, Artifact, 58 The Chord Keyset and the QWERTY Keyboard 59 and Methodology in which he is Trained." Perhaps because an early lack of funding prevented the dedicated use of a computer powerful enough, Engel
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application of the basic principles of the augmentation framework. Here, Engelbart was already thinking about subsequent applications of these 60 The Chord Keyset and the QWERTY Keyboard principles, once the mechanisms were learned and the processes in place. These applications involved new means of communication between the user and the computer that
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and involves interesting possibilities in both equipment and techniques. The other idea concerns the development of techniques for automating the The Chord Keyset and the QWERTY Keyboard 6 I 11;- FIgure 2-I. Engelbart's Chord Keyset. Source: Engelbart (I988), p. 200. teaching of psychomotor skills" using the chord keyset, with its
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Systems Laboratory. Sorensen was the education spe- cialist of the group and provided the academic background for the teaching 62 The Chord Keyset and the QWERTY Keyboard part of the second proposal. Bliss, who had joined SRI in 1956, had taken a leave of absence from 1958 to 1960 to obtain a
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evolution from five-key devIces to sIngle keys to full typewriter keyboards in telegraphy. What you are proposing is essentially The Chord Keyset and the QWERTY Keyboard 63 a telegraphic problem-the translation of finger motion into a code-and I sus- pect that the telegraphic art has thoroughly explored the pros
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specific context where the general problem oc- curred. Engelbart, in his answer, dated November 7, 1962, was prompt to 64 The Chord Keyset and the QWERTY Keyboard stress the obvious differences between the context of nineteenth-century teleg- raphy and the context of his own experiment: The typewriter keyboard is not a
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from the linear, "progressive" argument developed by Harold Wooster. A solution discarded at a certain point of time could re- The Chord Keyset and the QWERTY Keyboard 65 appear once the context had changed. But this line of argument was only hy- pothetical in Engelbart's answer, and would have required a
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]), deals with the encoding and the comparative values of Morse and five-unit codes only in the context of 66 The Chord Keyset and the QWERTY Keyboard 1 ' i o '\ olio' \ 1IJ.,.t. . :'tIt T ,f 0'0.0 . (') ,;, h , .. tjt " j. .. {i 't t: i '.t' ,I '" ..' oft *" .t. .- . , ]f'
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of the Morse code and this was achieved by the five-unit code. In this code there is no discrim- The Chord Keyset and the QWERTY Keyboard 67 Ination on duratIon of the elements of current as between dots and dashes but only in direction, either "spacing" or "markIng." All characters
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, proved not to be the decisive issue. It is true that pianolike keyboards and five-key sets practically disappeared in telegraphy in favor of the QWERTY keyboard. On that point, Harold Wooster was correct. The reason for this change, however, was not the pro- gressive development of technology that Wooster took for
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norm, in turn, involves the prior he- gemony of another incorporating practice: the use of Morse code in telegraphy. The rise to ubiquity of the QWERTY keyboard and the eclipse of the five- unit keyset began when telegraphers confronted the same problems that En- gelbart confronted when trying to develop a user
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Telegraphers needed "to set type at a distance. . . [and] to bring a particular type to a particular printing point 68 The Chord Keyset and the QWERTY Keyboard in the shortest possible time. . . over a single telegraph wire" (Murray 1905, 555). Solving these problems required the same things that Engelbart needed for his
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-unit code would have to be rejected, Murray said, was that "the Morse alphabet. . . has been in possession of the The Chord Keyset and the QWERTY Keyboard 69 field so long, and telegraph officials in English-speaking countries are so satu- rated with Morse traditions, that it would be impossible to introduce
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before there ever was such a thing as a suc- cessful commercial typewriter, the partnership between telegraphy and type- 70 The Chord Keyset and the QWERTY Keyboard writing (or, as telegraph operators called the typewriter, the "mill") was well established. 4 Training telegraph operators to touch type efficiently would be necessary whether
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touch typist works by touch on a typewriter keyboard. And as Donald Murray pointed out, the ability of the 72 The Chord Keyset and the QWERTY Keyboard '" / .. l:t . ,.."" q t , ', ' ... ,- , ....r2 """: .. ) -. - , -,,=. -... - .. \, . ? ," .... ' . "I i I- "\ ;-, iO<! r '0' I l' I' - ,-" J..l <..J.,..l , ' ,." I I " i l t " \" :' , <,,1 t
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special case, but there is no fun- damental difference in principle, with respect to touch typing, between chord keysets and what has become the standard QWERTY keyboard. And in actual fact, over the long history of efforts to develop a typewriting machine up to 1873, when the Remington Model I stabilized the
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form of data entry with the standard QWERTY keyboard, attempts to develop both typewriters and au- tomatic and/or printing telegraphic systems favored neither model (Herkimer County Historical Society 1923, 22). Instead, they focused
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, Dr. Samuel W. Fran- cis of New York was granted a patent for a machine "the keys of which re- The Chord Keyset and the QWERTY Keyboard 73 .t ;:-"')." II >' , .. .. J , . " ,.." Figure 2-4. The Sholes, Glidden, and Soule Machine, Patent of June 23, 1868. Source: Herkimer County Historical Society (19 2
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end, although their 1873 machine strongly resembles the now- familiar form of the Remington shift-key typewriter of 1878. 74 The Chord Keyset and the QWERTY Keyboard .. , . . . . . '(,..,. r ,:: ." , "".', .1, f -.#' }.. ........ . : ; ",. "'. F' t. '..,& j''; ,.- ,,>,o' , .Y;, d ' '> , (:; <''''_: ' ;.' - ' \ 1:" 'I ",/ 7 ' ,; - _ :' .' .... . ,'\: ' ': ," , :t :::;;;" ,':'_:'.. '.. '"'. "_ .. ... .. ... .... ., , ':.."'" .. ...... : . .t' I'J;'''-,y \:'. ... . .""... .' -. . '."" , ,' ' ': ,::," u :- . .:t-. .....'"'" , ' :' t ,:;, . ','1 " f t .' , "Ii ' "':/I
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keyboard, at the site where their hands were working, and I am tempted to say they still do so even now. The reason why the QWERTY keyboard became standard was simply that "touch typing" and "all-finger typing" required a standard keyboard. QWERTY became that standard-not out of any inherent
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the machine- user interface. It became the standard because it became the standard. Some- thing had to. Contrary to myth, Sholes had not invented the QWERTY keyboard in a di- abolical attempt to slow down typists to prevent overloading his primitive ma- chine. The machine was designed with the letters on the
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, which certainly would slow the typist, but which was a mechanical design problem, not a problem of the machine-user The Chord Keyset and the QWERTY Keyboard 75 .. -- i I , o( -..:.."" - A1J< - .. ,. - - >.... 'i> Figure 2-6. John Pratt's Typewriter, Patent of August I I, 1868. Source: Herkimer County Historical Society (1923
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by arranging the letters so that letters he believed fre- quently to occur in sequence would have type bars far apart. Touch typing and the QWERTY keyboard thus evolved together, symbiot- ically, as an instance of the sort of coevolution the cyberneticists later would identify. It was a slow process. Mrs.
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Figure 2-8 (below). The Remington Shift-Key Typewriter, I878. Source: HerkImer County Historical SocIety (I 9 23), p. 83. The Chord Keyset and the QWERTY Keyboard 77 Murray worried, the diffusion of touch typing was still very much considered a problem in 1905 and 191 I. But they did become standards
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upwards of one hundred thousand typists per year in positions in the United States alone. (Ibid., 78) The way in which touch typing on the QWERTY keyboard achieved he- gemony has been well noticed by historians and economists who have tried to explain the persistence of the QWERTY standard in spite of
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its alleged 78 The Chord Keyset and the QWERTY Keyboard inefficiency. Paul A. David, in a landmark paper on the topic, has argued that "touch typing gave rise to three features of the evolving
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. . . If the task of gettIng operators during the early days of the business was a dIfficult one in Amenca, in The Chord Keyset and the QWERTY Keyboard 79 the other countries It was formidable. It soon became evident that the problem could be solved only in one way, by the founding of
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- dustrial network of entrepreneurs, beginning in the earliest days of the diffu- sion of the typewriter, permitted the symbiotic coevolution of touch typing and the QWERTY keyboard. By World War I, both were well established. When, in 1962, Engelbart proposed to go back to a five-key handset to "communicate" with a
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as compared to 75 words per minute for those using the Baudot code. 7 However, Engelbart was wrong in assuming that in 1962, with the QWERTY keyboard long established as the norm for machine-user interfaces, the mere efficiency of the five-bit code implied that the human users (or operators) could
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- or would-willingly learn it and perform the translation with the help of a chord- ing input device, abandoning the QWERTY keyboard. Here again, Harold Wooster was correct: that learning process presented an impossible task. In fact, however, the history of the two devices never really established
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context of electronic computing fifty to one hundred years later, the performance advantages of the five-bit devices that Engelbart employed still existed. Although the QWERTY keyboard lay- out has been severely criticized since the 1930'S at least, with the invention of the Dvorak keyboard and its supposed efficiencies, no other
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that the standard keyboard has generated and second, the supremacy of this keyboard in retaining its universal position. . . . The design and the layout of the QWERTY keyboard are not optimal for efficient operation. However it is not feasible to modify the standard keyboard and hence improve, because of con- founding factors pertinent
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to QWERTY's situation. In 1981, the amount of com- mercial, financial and skill investment in the QWERTY keyboard is of greater im- portance than the fact that it is not the most efficiently designed layout. This is in effect confirmation of J. C
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technology to change the way people work, and to him, the chord keyset offered the best way to do that. As a replacement for the QWERTY keyboard, Engelbart's chord keyset nevertheless faced overwhelming odds against acceptance, even though it promised not only greater efficiency, but a direct, psychomotor, tactile, two- way
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the aug- mentation of the human intellect from Engelbart's SRI lab, however, eventually enjoyed considerably more success, this time as a supplement to the QWERTY keyboard: the mouse. CHAPTER THREE The Invention of the Mouse The problem of the dialogue between the individual and society, which has come up in connection
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indicator boxes and available for either off-line or on-line time-shared work. The only input device was the typewriter keyboard, a slightly modified QWERTY keyboard with switches for power, on/off, ready, and in/out and with several indicator lights marked "power," "enable," "ready," and so on. The only
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display from the user's tablet is not a source of serious dif- ficulty" (1965, 96). That is not surprising, since touch typing on a QWERTY keyboard as an incorporating practice long had accustomed potential users to the unlinking of eyes and hands. The main application of the GRAIL project was programming
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(Contract NAS-I-3988, report NTIS N66-30204). The "screen-select devices" that they began by considering took into consideration the continuing hegemony of the QWERTY keyboard. En- gelbart recalls saying: Here's one of the devices we could pick. I want it to be in context, so that you're making
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creator. From the start, the user of the personal computer thus was imagined in terms of an existing incorporating practice. As the history of the QWERTY keyboard shows, it is not familiarity with a given practice in dealing with a technology per se, however, but the diffusion of the practice that tends
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feedback loop is not absolute. Engelbart still had in mind an input and feedback loop that was purely tactile, that de- pended not on the QWERTY keyboard and mouse or mouse and chord key- InventIng the V,rtual User 115 , J ') ) , , . \' 't 'H \., 1 " , ,\ \ , ' ,t I. .., j\ " .:. " ...... Figure 4-5. Front View
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It was a concession to the hegemony of an existing technology that Engelbart had hoped to transcend, or at least to subsume- the typewriter's QWERTY keyboard. 1 ) With that concession came others. It was at the level of the display screen that a new model of the human-computer interaction emerged
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hands," but the way the hands can function in relation to each other. What was not important was the putative inevitabil- ity of the standard QWERTY keyboard as the only way to provide for the manual in put of texts. 218 Coda Allen Newell, while a little more sympathetic toward Engelbart's
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Margolis, In theIr "Fable of the Keys" reopened the debate In 1990 and challenged David's thesis. Their point was that the fact that the QWERTY keyboard remained the standard does not mean that the market mechanism was fail- ing, since they held that nothIng really proves that the QWERTY is less
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I 9). But when they claim that "the problem of implementing the conversion was not what kept the manufac- turers from changing keyboards" and "the QWERTY keyboard cannot have been so well established at the time the rIval keyboards were first offered that they were rejected because they were non-standard" (ibId
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1986. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press. Norman, D. 1990. The Design of Everyday Things. New York: Doubleday. Noyes, J. I9 8 3 a . "The QWERTY Keyboard: A Review." InternatIonal Journal of Man-Mach,ne Stud,es 18: 265-81. . I9 8 3 b . "Chord Keyboards." ApplIed ErgonomIcs 14, no. I: 55
Your Computer Is on Fire
by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip · 9 Mar 2021 · 661pp · 156,009 words
typewriter. Remington’s new product was a simple device that lacked a shift key and so printed every word in capital letters—although with a QWERTY keyboard that would remain the standard for any word-processing machine. It was promoted as a time-saving device for letter writing, with the added advantage
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standard and double width, rather than individual variance among letters. His design thus fit Arabic within what Mullaney identifies as the key features of the QWERTY keyboard, with letters that all fell around a single baseline.10 But Haddad was unable to make Arabic letters isomorphic, with the same shape regardless of
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”—by now one of the most influential economic theories of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He posed the question: Given how remarkably inefficient the QWERTY keyboard is, how has it maintained its market dominance? Why has it never been replaced by other keyboard arrangements—arrangements that, he and others have argued
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paths already taken to that point. This “dependency,” he argues, helps us account for the endurance of inferior options. David’s choice of target—the QWERTY keyboard—must have struck many readers as iconoclastic and exhilarating at the time. He was, after all, taking aim at an interface that, by the mid
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.” It “condemns us to awkward finger sequences.” “In a normal workday,” he continues, “a good typist’s fingers cover up to 20 miles on a QWERTY keyboard.” QWERTY is a “disaster.”2 When we scratch at the surface of this exhilarating anti-QWERTY iconoclasm, however, things begin to look less revolutionary, if
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late in the game. Whereas a vocal minority of individuals in the Anglophone Latin-alphabetic world has been questioning the long-accepted sanctity of the QWERTY keyboard since the 1980s, those outside of the Latin- alphabetic world have been critiquing QWERTY for nearly one hundred years longer. It was not the 1980s
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on its implications, are the goals of this chapter. The False Universality of QWERTY Before delving in, we must first ask: What exactly is the QWERTY keyboard? For many, its defining feature is “Q-W-E-R-T-Y” itself: that is, the specific way in which the letters of the Latin
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alphabet are arranged on the surface of the interface. To study the QWERTY keyboard is to try and internalize this layout so that it becomes encoded in muscle memory. This way of defining QWERTY and QWERTY-style keyboards, however
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(not to mention the approximately 120 million speakers of Japanese, whose writing system is also based in part on nonalphabetic, Chinese character-based script), the QWERTY keyboard as originally conceptualized is fundamentally incompatible.5 Altogether, when one tallies up the total population of those whose writing systems are excluded from the logics
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themselves). Indeed, from the 1980s to the present day, never has a non-QWERTY-style computer keyboard or input surface ever seriously competed with the QWERTY keyboard anywhere in the world. As global computing has given way to a standardized technological monoculture of QWERTY-based interfaces (just as typewriting did before it
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computational text input have not undergone standardization or stabilization. To the contrary, in fact, the case of Chinese computing demonstrates how, despite the ubiquity of QWERTY keyboards, the number of Chinese input systems has proliferated during this period, with many hundreds of systems competing in what is sometimes referred to as the
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, meaning “electricity,” for each.) How is it possible that the 1980s and ’90s was simultaneously a time of interface stabilization (in the form of the QWERTY keyboard) for Chinese computing but also a time of interface destabilization (in the form of the “Input Wars”)? In trying to resolve these two paradoxes (How
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forth but create the sounds we associate with drum kits, cellos, bagpipes, and more. What MIDI effected for the instrument form, input effected for the QWERTY keyboard. Just as one could use a piano-shaped MIDI controller to play the cello, or a woodwind-shaped MIDI controller to play a drum kit
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(or perhaps Latin-alphabetic-shaped) keyboard to “play Chinese.” For this reason, even when the instrument form remained consistent (in our case, the now-dominant QWERTY keyboard within Sinophone computing), the number of different instruments that said controller could control became effectively unlimited. Chinese computing is not unique in this regard. Across
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deep-seated limitations and to render it compatible with the basic orthographic requirements of non-Latin writing systems. Thus, it is not in fact the QWERTY keyboard that has “globalized” or “spread around the world” by virtue of its own supremacy and power. Rather, it is thanks to the development of a
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suite of “compensatory” technologies that the QWERTY keyboard has been able to expand beyond its fundamentally narrow and provincial origins. In the end, we could say, it was the non-Western world that
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that would have been prohibitively difficult or even impossible in noncomputational frameworks). In doing so, the escape from QWERTY has not required throwing away the QWERTY keyboard or replacing it with another physical interface—only a capacity, and perhaps a necessity, to reimagine what the existing interface is and how it behaves
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for English?” The answer to this question is yes—or, at the very least: There is absolutely no reason why there couldn’t be. The QWERTY keyboard in the English-speaking world, and within Latin-alphabetic computing more broadly, is as much a computational device as it is within the context of
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than interrogate the two core “logics” of mechanical typewriting: presence, and what-you-type-is-what-you-get. To return to the MIDI analogy, the QWERTY keyboard in the Anglophone world is as much a MIDI piano as in the non-Latin world, the main difference being: Anglophone computer users have convinced
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: What would happen if they actually got what they wanted? What would happen if “path dependence” could be overcome, and we really could replace the QWERTY keyboard with the Dvorak layout? What if all keyboards were magically jettisoned and replaced by speech-to-text algorithms (arguably the newest object of fetishization among
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the average speed of human speech (120 words per minute) with most of us “crawling” at 14 to 31 wpm. Robert Winder, meanwhile, called the QWERTY keyboard a “conspiracy.” Eleanor Smith “Life after QWERTY,” Atlantic (November 2013); Robert Winder, “The Qwerty Conspiracy,” Independent (August 12, 1995). 4. There is, in fact, another
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baseline “logic” of the QWERTY keyboard that, while we do not have time to address in this venue, needs to be emphasized: namely, that there is a “keyboard” at all. Early
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, 345, 345f, 348–350, 353, 367 Chinese typewriter, 346, 350 dian, 351, 352f, 352 difficulty score, 344–345 MingKwai keyboard, 346–349, 347f, 353 and QWERTY keyboard, 338–339, 342, 346, 350–351, 353–354, 357 retrieval system, 346–347, 349–350, 353 script, 221 search writer, 350 Christian, 161, 170–171
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, Paul, 274 Kasparov, Garry, 7 Keating, Stephen, 128–129 Kelly, Kevin, 32 Kenya, 188, 189t, 314, 322, 326–330, 333 Keyboard. See also Chinese keyboard; QWERTY keyboard depression, 236, 340–341, 346, 348–349 efficiency, 337–338, 344 Japanese, 216 MingKwai, 346–349, 347f, 353 not the interface, 350–356 Keystroke, 219
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Python, 275 Qeyno Group, 264–266 Qualcomm, 330 Quest for the Holy Grail, The, 234–235 Quine, W. V. O., 278–279, 281, 284–285 QWERTY keyboard Arabic and, 215–216, 220 ASCII, 188, 222, 226, 283–284 auto-advancing, 340 Chinese writing (see Chinese keyboard) depression equals impression, 341 false universality
Guns, germs, and steel: the fates of human societies
by Jared M. Diamond · 15 Jul 2005
great. Still another factor is compatibility with vested interests. This book, like probably every other typed document you have ever read, was typed with a QWERTY keyboard, named for the left-most six letters in its upper row. Unbelievable as it may now sound, that keyboard layout was designed in 1873 as
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with an efficiently laid-out keyboard showed that it would let us double our typing speed and reduce our typing effort by 95 percent. But QWERTY keyboards were solidly entrenched by then. The vested interests of hundreds of millions of QWERTY typists, typing teachers, typewriter and computer salespeople, and manufacturers have crushed
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all moves toward keyboard efficiency for over 60-years. While the story of the QWERTY keyboard may sound funny, many similar cases have involved much heavier economic consequences. Why does Japan now dominate the world market for transistorized electronic consumer products
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, which adopted them enthusiastically and already used them against French sol- diers at the battle of Crecy six years later. THUS, WHEELS, DESIGNER jeans, and QWERTY keyboards illustrate the varied reasons why the same society is not equally receptive to all inventions. Conversely, the same invention's reception also varies greatly among
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cultural processes are among histo- ry's wild cards that would tend to make history unpredictable. As one example, I mentioned in Chapter 13 the QWERTY keyboard for typewriters. It was adopted initially, out of many competing keyboard designs, for trivial specific reasons involving early typewriter construction in America in the 1860s
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another keyboard at any of numerous stages between the 1860s and the 1880s; nothing about the American environment favored the QWERTY keyboard over its rivals. Once the decision had been made, though, the QWERTY keyboard became so entrenched that it was also adopted for computer keyboard design a century later. Equally trivial specific reasons
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have not affected the competitive success of the societies adopting them. But it is easy to imagine how they could have. For example, if the QWERTY keyboard of the United States had not been adopted elsewhere in the world as well say, if Japan or Europe had adopted the much more efficient
Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence
by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb · 16 Apr 2018 · 345pp · 75,660 words
of QWERTY altogether. What kept them coming back to it was familiarity. After all, their closest competitor at the time, the BlackBerry, had a hard QWERTY keyboard that performed so well the product was commonly known as the “Crackberry” for its addictive nature. “The biggest science project” of the iPhone was the
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software developer had free rein to explore other options. By the end of the three weeks, they had a keyboard that looked like a small QWERTY keyboard with a substantial tweak. While the image the user saw did not change, the surface area around a particular set of keys expanded when typing
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data collection, 189–190 probabilistic programming, 38, 40 processes. See work flows Project Apollo, 164 Putin, Vladimir, 217 Qi Lu, 219 quality risks, 198–199 QWERTY keyboards, 129–130 racial profiling, 195–196 radiologists, 55–56, 108–109, 145–148 recruitment, 127–129 reengineering, 123–135 Reengineering the Corporation (Hammer and Champy
Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity
by Edward Tenner · 8 Jun 2004 · 423pp · 126,096 words
Densmore’s reasoning completely. It would probably be necessary to find an operating Model 1 or 2 typewriter and experiment with combinations of letters. The QWERTY keyboard, as it came to be known, was clearly a compromise. On the middle row of text there was a nearly alphabetical sequence: DFGHJKLM. The last
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of alphabetical order. Sholes and Densmore were both familiar with newspaper type cases, arranged not in alphabetical order but roughly according to letter frequency. The QWERTY keyboard did not follow these patterns but was conceived in a similar spirit.27 Sholes and Densmore made a fateful assumption about the operator’s technique
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seemed reasonable to think that typewriter operators would do the same—as, indeed, all but a few initially did. For this style of work the QWERTY keyboard was relatively efficient. Its leading twentieth-century critic, August Dvorak, found that the most frequent letters were typed with the first two fingers of the
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a well-to-do banker in the West, Mrs. Longley left teaching, and Torrey and others could have sold new editions of their textbooks. The QWERTY keyboard was not the best imaginable, even in the late nineteenth century, but it was good enough that expert typists did not feel frustrated by it
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students likewise wanted to learn the most widely accepted arrangement. Later the economist Paul David called such pressures for standardization “network externalities” and cited the QWERTY keyboard in an influential paper arguing that historical contingency can, paradoxically lock inferior technology into place.29 During the early twentieth century those who challenged the
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a machine for solving differential equations, applied to problems from atomic structure and ballistics to railroad timetables.37 It was digital processing that wedded the QWERTY keyboard to the computer. Early World War II and postwar digital machines used keyboard-encoded punch cards and tape, first paper and then magnetic, and teletype
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industry and academia. With the expansion of personal computing in the 1980s, accelerated by improved Web browsers and Internet service from the mid-1990s, the QWERTY keyboard has become a universal interface.38 But along with this victory of QWERTY has appeared new hope for reform. Electronic keyboards can be reprogrammed with
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as its advocates had long claimed, gains in speed were modest: the advantage was only about 5 to 10 percent. They found the long-maligned QWERTY keyboard surprisingly rational in its high number of alternating-hand sequences. The Norman studies and others bolstered an influential 1990 rebuttal to Paul David’s analysis
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merits.41 The critics of the Dvorak layout have a point. Typists’ minds are able to manage the additional 37 percent finger travel of the QWERTY keyboard without a corresponding loss of speed. Differentials range from a mere 2.6 percent for Dvorak, to 11 percent. A 1980 Japanese study suggested 15
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best to revive it. Yet the smaller the portable device, the more likely it appears that someone will find a way to plug a portable QWERTY keyboard into it. Several are available for the Palm Pilot personal digital assistant (PDA). Even graphically oriented Apple included a detachable keyboard with the last version
Practical Vim, Second Edition (for Stefano Alcazi)
by Drew Neil
to operate Vim quicker. The first thing you learn as a touch typist is that your fingers should rest on the home row. On a Qwerty keyboard, that means the left-hand fingers rest on a, s, d, and f, while the right-hand fingers rest on j, k, l, and ; keys
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might help if you’re struggling to remember which key does what. The letter j sort of looks like an arrow pointing downward. On a Qwerty keyboard, the h and l keys are positioned to the left and right of each other, mirroring the direction in which they move the cursor. Although
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keys will feel strange. You’ll wonder how you put up with it for so long! Leave Your Right Hand Where It Belongs On a Qwerty keyboard, the j, k, and l keys fall directly beneath the index, middle, and ring fingers of the right hand. We use the index finger to
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from that, I hardly touch them. Given how little I use the h key, I’m happy to have to stretch for it on a Qwerty keyboard. On the flip side, I use the character search commands often (see Tip 50), so I’m pleased that the ; key rests comfortably beneath my
Practical Vim
by Drew Neil
to operate Vim quicker. The first thing you learn as a touch typist is that your fingers should rest on the home row. On a Qwerty keyboard, that means the left-hand fingers rest on a, s, d, and f, while the right-hand fingers rest on j, k, l, and ; keys
…
might help if you’re struggling to remember which key does what. The letter j sort of looks like an arrow pointing downward. On a Qwerty keyboard, the h and l keys are positioned to the left and right of each other, mirroring the direction in which they move the cursor. Although
…
keys will feel strange. You’ll wonder how you put up with it for so long! Leave Your Right Hand Where It Belongs On a Qwerty keyboard, the j, k, and l keys fall directly beneath the index, middle, and ring fingers of the right hand. We use the index finger to
…
from that, I hardly touch them. Given how little I use the h key, I’m happy to have to stretch for it on a Qwerty keyboard. On the flip side, I use the character search commands often (see Tip 50), so I’m pleased that the ; key rests comfortably beneath my
Computer: A History of the Information Machine
by Martin Campbell-Kelly and Nathan Ensmenger · 29 Jul 2013 · 528pp · 146,459 words
around this jamming problem was to arrange the letters in the type-basket so that they were less likely to collide. The result was the QWERTY keyboard layout that is still with us. (Incidentally, a vestige of the original alphabetical ordering can be seen on the middle row of the keyboard, where
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PDA “Blackberry” in 1999. Blackberry benefited in the business and government handset markets from RIM’s private data network, user-friendly e-mail, and miniature QWERTY keyboard. Microsoft, which came late to the PDA/smartphone platform business by licensing Windows-based mobile operating systems, had some success in the enterprise market before
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life-insurance customers helped shape IBM’s products. Page 22“let them in on the ground floor”: Quoted in Bliven 1954, p. 48. Page 23the QWERTY keyboard layout that is still with us: See David 1986. Page 23“typewriter was the most complex mechanism mass produced by American industry”: Hoke 1990, p
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and, 43, 44, 56 manufacturers of, 27, 117 for scientific calculations, 53 scientific war effort and, 65, 79 stored-program computers and, 76 QUICKTRAN, 212 QWERTY keyboard layout, 22, 23, 297 Radar, 65, 70–71, 83, 149 Rader, Louis T., 123 Radio Shack, 241, 271 Railway Clearing House (England), 10–11 Rand
Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
by Daniel C. Dennett · 15 Jan 1995 · 846pp · 232,630 words
and ... the social cost of change ... mounted with the vested interest created by the fact that so many fingers now knew how to follow the QWERTY keyboard. QWERTY has stayed on despite the existence of other, more "rational" systems. [Papert 1980, p. 33.]12 The imperious restrictions we encounter inside the Library
B Is for Bauhaus, Y Is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World From a to Z
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Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks
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JPod
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Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
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