QWERTY keyboard

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Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Writing Science)
by Thierry Bardini
Published 1 Dec 2000

It was by no means clear yet what a typewriter should be like or how it should be operated. In particular, it was by no means clear that touch typing had to be touch typing as we know it today, on a QWERTY keyboard. Many early typewriters in fact employed chord keysets. It took the emergence of touch typing on a QWERTY keyboard as an incorporating practice to settle The Chord Keyset and the QWERTY Keyboard 71 that issue and to finally seem to banish the chord keyset to the museum of ob- solete technologies. QWERTY keyboards, chord keysets, and, indeed, Morse telegraph keys all share an essential characteristic: the unlinking" of the hand, eye, and letter.

In the different 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 type input device 80 The Chord Keyset and the QWERTY Keyboard ever has managed to challenge its supremacy. 8 As Jan Noyes (19 8 3 a , 278-79) puts it in "The QWERTY Keyboard: A Review": Rearranging the letters of the QWERTY layout has been shown to be a fruitless pastime, but it has demonstrated two important points: first, the amount of hos- tile feeling that the standard keyboard has generated and second, the supremacy of this keyboard in retaining its universal position. . . .

As I eventually discovered, its value as an input device had been well recognized since the nineteenth century. Engelbart was able to ignore its subsequent eclipse and see how it could serve his purposes for user-machine communications in a way that what had become the standard, ubiquitous input device, the QWERTY keyboard, could not. What he was unable to ignore, however, was the hegemony of the QWERTY keyboard. "RE-INVENTING THE HIGH-WHEEL BICYCLE WITH GOVERNMENT FUNDS" The charge that, at this early stage, Engelbart was simply returning to an obso- lete and discarded technology was made by one of his sponsors, Harold Woos- ter, director of the Information Sciences Directorate of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research at the time of Engelbart's second proposal.

pages: 255 words: 76,834

Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs
by Ken Kocienda
Published 3 Sep 2018

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. 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 touchscreen is now normal. 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 about.

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 solutions in sight. Now you could type people’s names. You could type like a pirate. You 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 people type individual words.

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 “cold” but typed colf instead, you could imagine how spinning the fourth tumbler to a different letter would produce the desired word. This is a basic concept behind autocorrection, finding the best combination of letters given the taps from a typist, the keys 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.

pages: 661 words: 156,009

Your Computer Is on Fire
by Thomas S. Mullaney , Benjamin Peters , Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip
Published 9 Mar 2021

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 not remarkably 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.

• QWERTY and QWERTY-style keyboards, as originally conceived, are incompatible with the writing systems used by more than half of the world’s population. Explaining this paradox, and reflecting 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 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, obscures much more than it reveals. When we put aside this (literally) superficial definition of QWERTY and begin to examine how these machines behave mechanically—features of the machine that are taken for granted but which exert profound influence on the writing being produced—we discover a much larger set of qualities, most of which are so familiar to an English-speaking reader that they quickly become invisible.

With the advent of computer music in the 1960s, it became possible for musicians to play instruments that looked and felt like guitars, keyboards, flutes, and so 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, an operator in China can used a QWERTY-shaped (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.

pages: 423 words: 126,096

Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity
by Edward Tenner
Published 8 Jun 2004

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 letter was later moved to the bottom row, where the original C and X were also later reversed. On the top row was a vowel cluster (UIO) out 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.

Norman and Fisher found that although the Dvorak arrangement did indeed save on motion 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 by two fellow economists, S. J. Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis, who argued that the Dvorak arrangement had lost on its 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.

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. Compositors used thumb and forefinger and looked at the type case as they worked, and it 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 left hand and the index finger of the right. There seems to be a balance between putting all the most frequent characters near the center of the keyboard and maintaining an order that will make it easier to find keys visually, like keeping O and P as well as the middle-row sequence together.

The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting
by Anne Trubek
Published 5 Sep 2016

“Since the introduction of the typewriter in our junior high schools, there is a tendency to minimize the importance of the teaching of handwriting,” wrote a Pittsburgh school administrator in 1924.14 In 1938 the New York Times published an article, “Of Lead Pencils,” that warned, “Writing with one’s own hand seems to be disappearing, and the universal typewriter may swallow all.”15 The placement of the keys on the typewriter greatly influenced the speed of the typist. The letters were arranged into an idiosyncratic pattern—that, despite it being inefficient and of no purpose to us today, remains: the QWERTY keyboard. QWERTY was invented in 1873 in order to separate common letter pairs, preventing type bars from sticking together when struck sequentially. But QWERTY keyboards did not come with any instruction manual for how best to use them. Most people used either two or four fingers to type. In 1888, Frank McGurrin created a system that all people could use, one that would be the most efficient.

As we keep writing more on different surfaces, we create new methods of making letters: We press our fingers onto glass, we swipe across touch screens, and we talk to Siri, dictating our words to a digital scribe, just as Socrates, Caesar, the popes, royals, and novelists of the past did. The pace of change (with the exception of our stubborn commitment to the QWERTY keyboard) has been so rapid, it is easy to forget how quickly and sweepingly we have changed. If the history recounted here repeats itself, there will be less heterogeneity soon; keyboarding—perhaps done by swiping instead of pressing—will become ubiquitous in American elementary classrooms, and we will develop new cultural, emotional, and individual associations with the rhythm and look and feel of pressing letters, ones that we may then impart to our children when they learn to write.

See also calligraphy; handwriting curricula for, here drills for, here, here, here, here, here master penmen teaching, here, here Palmer Method of, here, here, here Spencer’s method of, here, here, here, here, here standardization of, here, here, here typewriting compared to, here, here and forensic document examination, here, here manufacturers of, here nibs for, here, here quill pens, here, here, here, here, here reed pens, here, here of scribal monks, here, here as writing technology, here writing with, here Persia, here Peters, Cortez, here Petrarch, here Philodemus of Gadara, here Phoenician alphabet, here phonics, here phrenology, here Pinker, Steven, here Pius II, Pope, here Pius IX, Pope, here Plato, here Pliny the Elder, here, here Pliny the Younger, here Poe, Edgar Allan, here Pompeii, here, here, here Powell, Barry, here Powers, Richard, here Preyer, Wilhelm, here print culture, here printing press claims against, here effect on calligraphic tradition, here effect on handwriting, here effect on scribes, here, here, here invention of, here, here, here standardization of fonts, here, here survival of writing from, here prisons and prisoners, here professions, scripts associated with, here, here, here proto-writing, here, here pseudosciences, here Ptolemaic period, here public schools, handwriting pedagogy in, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here punctuation, here, here, here, here, here questioned document examiners, here quill pens, here, here, here, here, here quipus (Incan knotted cords), here QWERTY keyboard, here, here racial hierarchies, here Ravel, Maurice, here Rawlinson, Henry, here reading. See also literacy cognitive effects of, here of cuneiform, here, here effect of handwriting on comprehension, here, here silent reading, here, here, here and standardization of typewriting, here, here teaching of, here, here, here recto, here, here reed pens, here, here reed styluses, here Remington, Eliphalet, here Remington typewriters, here, here, here, here Renaissance, here, here, here rhetorical skills, here Rice, Victor M., here right-handed writing, here Roman alphabet, here, here, here, here Romance languages, here Roman Empire, here, here, here Romans books created by, here, here, here bookstores of, here bureaucracy of, here oral communication of, here, here papyrus used by, here, here scribes of, here, here scripts used by, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here survival of writing by, here, here, here, here, here Romantic era, here, here Rosetta stone, here round hand, here, here, here Rowling, J.

pages: 335 words: 111,405

B Is for Bauhaus, Y Is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World From a to Z
by Deyan Sudjic
Published 17 Feb 2015

But if Kerouac managed to sidestep one of the technical constraints of the format he worked in, he accepted a more fundamental intrusion between his mind as it formed words, and his attempts to record and crystallize them. He used the QWERTY keyboard as the route between his fingers and the paper, or rather between his brain and the paper. The relationship between the two is indirect. The skill with which his fingers manipulate the keyboard does not in itself reflect the quality of his words, in the way that a pianist’s musical performance would do. Just as a steering wheel is not the only method of controlling a car, so the QWERTY keyboard is not the only kind of interface that allows a writer to work. Early automobiles used tillers.

Proceeding through the alphabet, this book does indeed touch upon “B is for Bauhaus,” but as much through an exploration of the significance of a massive exhibition catalogue for the Bauhaus show I saw in London as a schoolboy as through an objective appraisal of the movement. I am equally fascinated by the significance of collection, of the squalor of car interiors, and the impact of a Qwerty keyboard on my approach to writing. This is a book that reflects my life over the last thirty years as a critic and a curator, and is written from the vantage point of the Design Museum. There is no better place to look at the constantly fluctuating, endlessly fascinating world of design. I have a green fishtail parka that I bought in a shop on a backstreet by a canal in Milan.

He made each key into a rounded button, stretching a soft rubber membrane over the whole surface. He somewhat coarsened the effect at his lectures by interspersing close-up photographs of the machine in profile, a single Michelangelo digit reaching out to depress one of the keys with the image of a nipple. The QWERTY keyboard used to be the most effective way to communicate with and control a machine, until Steve Jobs teamed it with a screen and a mouse – what used to be called the graphic user interface. Jobs created not simply the window through which the computer could be coaxed, haltingly, to explain itself to the user, but the place in which the user could work directly with the machine.

pages: 199 words: 43,653

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
by Nir Eyal
Published 26 Dec 2013

Gourville writes that products that require a high degree of behavior change are doomed to fail even if the benefits of using the new product are clear and substantial. For example, the technology I am using to write this book is inferior to existing alternatives in many ways. I’m referring to the QWERTY keyboard which was first developed in the 1870s for the now-ancient typewriter. QWERTY was designed with commonly used characters spaced far apart. This layout prevented typists from jamming the metal type bars of early machines.11 This physical limitation is an anachronism in the digital age, yet QWERTY keyboards remain the standard despite the invention of far better layouts. Professor August Dvorak’s keyboard design, for example, placed vowels in the center row, increasing typing speed and accuracy.

Gourville, “Eager Sellers and Stony Buyers: Understanding the Psychology of New-Product Adoption,” Harvard Business Review (accessed Nov, 12, 2013), http://hbr.org/product/eager-sellers-and-stony-buyers-understanding-the-p/an/R0606F-PDF-ENG. 11. Cecil Adams, “Was the QWERTY Keyboard Purposely Designed to Slow Typists?,” Straight Dope (Oct. 30, 1981), http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/221/was-the-qwerty-keyboard-purposely-designed-to-slow-typists. 12. Mark E. Bouton, “Context and Behavioral Processes in Extinction,” Learning & Memory 11, no. 5 (Sept. 2004): 485–94, doi:10.1101/lm.78804. 13. Ari P. Kirshenbaum, Darlene M. Olsen, and Warren K.

Guns, germs, and steel: the fates of human societies
by Jared M. Diamond
Published 15 Jul 2005

When improve- ments in typewriters eliminated the problem of jamming, trials in 1932 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 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, to a degree that damages the United States's balance of payments with Japan, even though transistors were invented and pat- ented in the United States?

Longley's star typing pupil Frank McGurrin, who thrashed Ms. Longley's non-QWERTY competitor Louis Taub in a widely publicized typing contest in 1888. The decision could have gone to 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, now lost in the remote past, may have lain behind the Sumer- ian adoption of a counting system based on 12 instead of 10 (leading to our modern 60-minute hour, 24-hour day, 12-month year, and 360-degree circle), in contrast to the widespread Mesoamerican counting system based on 20 (leading to its calendar using two concurrent cycles of 260 named days and a 365-day year).

Similarly, Japan continues to use its horrendously cumbersome kanji writ- ing system in preference to efficient alphabets or Japan's own efficient kana syllabarybecause the prestige attached to kanji is so 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 a feat of anti-engineering. It employs a whole series of perverse tricks designed to force typists to type as slowly as possible, such as scatter- ing the commonest letters over all keyboard rows and concentrating them on the left side (where right-handed people have to use their weaker hand).

pages: 408 words: 105,715

Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern
by Jing Tsu
Published 18 Jan 2022

In fact, Zhou noted, “Any such idea as providing one key for each character was little short of absurdity.” That is why, he resolved, “the design of a Chinese typewriter must be fundamentally and radically different from any of the existing American typewriters.” The very idea of a keyboard itself, as Zhou saw it, had to be reimagined. By Zhou’s time, the QWERTY keyboard was standardized and universal. But it must have stimulated his imagination to learn that earlier Western typewriters did not always have the keyboard we recognize today—or even look like modern typewriters at all. A Sholes & Glidden Type Writer at the 1876 Philadelphia fair was encased in a wooden box with a crank and wheel attached to one side of the carriage.

Any typist could type on it, even if he or she did not know a single character in Chinese. Every piece of information for locating a character was encoded on those seventy-two keys, which were simply labeled with character components instead of alphabet letters. It was no bigger than a standard QWERTY keyboard, and save for those Chinese inscriptions, it looked just like your average Western typewriter. Lin was as excited as a schoolboy, because he had spent decades developing the Chinese keyboard to be used in the simplest, most straightforward way possible for printing up to ninety thousand characters.

That is the lesson that has been demonstrated with greater and greater clarity in the digital age. For the East Asia region, who gets to provide the most digitally comprehensive representation of Chinese characters first is important. Once a representation becomes embedded in the technological infrastructure—as with Morse code, the QWERTY keyboard, Romanization schemes, the Four-Corner Method, ASCII, Taiwan’s character set for the RLG, and all other attempts to modernize Chinese—it gets reinforced via repeated use within the technological infrastructure until it is embedded within that technology. This recognition has touched off a race among Han script users.

pages: 345 words: 84,847

The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World
by David Eagleman and Anthony Brandt
Published 30 Sep 2017

“Design, Evaluation, and Dissemination of a Plastic Syringe Clip to Improve Dosing Accuracy of Liquid Medications.” Annals of Biomedical Engineering 41, no. 9 (2013): 1860–8. doi:10.1007/s10439-013-0780-z. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23471817 Stamp, Jimmy. “Fact of Fiction? The Legend of the QWERTY Keyboard.” Smithsonian. May 3, 2013. Accessed May 11, 2016. <http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fact-of-fiction-the-legend-of-the-qwerty-keyboard-49863249> Stanley, Matthew. “An Expedition to Heal the Wounds of War.” Isis 94, no. 1 (2003): 57–89. Steinitz, Richard. György Ligeti: Music of the Imagination. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003. Stevens, Jeffrey R., Alaxandra G.

It seems safer there because it builds on what a community already knows and loves. But moving incrementally carries a risk: the public may move on without you. Consider the BlackBerry smartphone. In 2003, the technology company RIM brought the first BlackBerry to market. Its main innovation was a full QWERTY keyboard, making it possible to answer emails as well as take phone calls. By 2007, BlackBerry phones were such a success that the company’s stock had increased eighty-fold. RIM had become one of the tech sector’s hottest companies. That same year Apple introduced the first iPhone. BlackBerry’s market share and stock price continued to rise for a while, hitting new highs, but the attention of the public began to turn toward touchscreen phones.

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(Arcangel) ref1, ref2 super-font ref1 superheroes ref1 surprise ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 each other ref1, ref2, ref3 sweet potatoes ref1 sweet spot ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Swift, Philip K. ref1 Swigert, Jack ref1, ref2 symmetry, visual ref1 Symmetry 454 (calendar) ref1 synecdoche ref1 Szilard, Leo ref1 Szotyńscy and Zaleski (company) ref1 The Taking of Pelham 123 (film) ref1 Tata ref1 Tate, Nahum ref1 tech box (IDEO) ref1 technology bending ref1 blending ref1 breaking ref1 education ref1, ref2 flexibility ref1 proliferating options ref1 testing possibilities ref1, ref2, ref3 Telemeter ref1 television (tv) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Teller, Astro ref1 Teller, Edward ref1 three Bs see also bending; blending; breaking ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Three Flags (Johns) ref1 Three Studies for Portraits (including Self-portrait) (Bacon) ref1 3M Corporation ref1, ref2 300 (film) ref1, ref2 Tilman, Congressman John Q. ref1 time bending ref1 blending ref1 breaking ref1 “end of time” illusion ref1 release medications ref1 sharing ref1 timelessness ref1 Time (magazine) ref1 Titled Arc (Serra) ref1 To B.W.T. (1950) (Guston) ref1 “Today in 1963” (article) (Bel Geddes) ref1 “Tom’s Diner” (song) ref1 “Too Marvelous for Words” (song) ref1 touchscreens ref1 Toyota Corporation ref1 Toyota FCV Plus ref1 Toyota i-Car ref1 transistors ref1 “transitron” ref1 The Travelers (Catalano) ref1 Tree of Codes (Foer) ref1 Trehub, Sandra ref1 trolley cars ref1 The True Story of the Three Little Pigs (Scieszka) ref1 Turner, Mark ref1 Twain, Mark ref1, ref2 Twitter ref1 Twombly, Cy ref1 umbrellas ref1 Un dimanche après-midi à l’île de la Grande Jatte (Seurat) ref1 unBrella ref1 universal beauty ref1 universal language ref1, ref2 Unrecognized (Abakanowicz) ref1 vacuum cleaners ref1 van Bruggen, Coosje ref1 van Gogh, Vincent ref1 variation ref1 Vega, Suzanne ref1 Velázquez, Diego ref1 Veloso, Manuela ref1 ventilators ref1 verlan (French slang) ref1 Verna, Tony ref1 Versailles, Palace of ref1 Versatile Extra Sensory Transducer Vest ref1 Viktor & Rolf ref1 Violin Concerto (Beethoven) ref1 visual perception ref1 visual symmetry ref1 Volute ref1 Waldorf institutions ref1 Walker, Shirley ref1 Walkman, Sony ref1 Wall-less House ref1 Walsh, Craig ref1 Warped Building (“Krzywy Domek”) ref1 Washington, Denzel ref1 Water Lilies and Japanese Footbridge (Monet) ref1 Wegener, Alfred ref1, ref2 The Well-Tempered Clavier (Bach) ref1 Wells Fargo bank ref1 West Side Story (musical) ref1 Westinghouse ref1 what-ifs ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 see also future White Album (album) ref1 White Flag (Johns) ref1 White on White (Malevich) ref1 Whitney, Eli ref1, ref2 Wiles, Andrew ref1 Wilson, E.O. ref1, ref2, ref3 Wilson, John Tuzo ref1 Windows 8 ref1 windshields ref1, ref2 Winehouse, Amy ref1 wing warping ref1 The Winstons (band) ref1 Women of Algiers (Delacroix) ref1 workplace changes ref1 World calendar ref1 World Season Calendar ref1 World Wide Web ref1 World’s Fairs ref1 Wright, Orville ref1 Wright brothers ref1, ref2, ref3 Wyler, William ref1 X research and development (Google) ref1, ref2 Xerox Corporation ref1, ref2 XPrize ref1 X-Space library ref1 Yoko Ono ref1 YouTube ref1, ref2 Zamenhof, L.L. ref1 Zen gardens ref1 zombies ref1, ref2 NOTES Introduction 1 Gene Kranz, Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). 2 Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger, Apollo 13 (New York: Pocket Books, 1995). 3 John Richardson and Marilyn McCully, A Life of Picasso (New York: Random House, 1991). 4 William Rubin, Pablo Picasso, Hélène Seckel-Klein and Judith Cousins, Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994). 5 A.L.

Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks
by Keith Houston
Published 23 Sep 2013

.* Tomlinson’s own e-mail address, written using this newly formulated rule, was tomlinson@bbn-tenexa, signifying the mailbox of the user named “tomlinson” on the computer named “bbn-tenexa,” the first of the company’s two mainframes running TENEX.20 Figure 5.2 ASR-33 keyboard. Unlike modern QWERTY keyboards, the @ symbol shares a key with the letter P. With the modifications to his mail program completed and an addressing scheme decided, Tomlinson typed out a brief message on the second machine and sent it to his mailbox on the first. The message was broken down into packets as it entered the ARPANET, which then routed each packet individually to its destination and reassembled them into a complete message at the other end before it was finally appended to his mailbox on bbn-tenexa.

And aside from the immediate dangers of seared flesh, operators of both Linotypes and Monotypes ran the more insidious risk of poisoning from the (highly flammable) benzene used to clean matrices, the natural gas that some machines burned to melt the type metal, and the fumes emitted by the molten type metal itself.51 Figure 7.6 A Monotype keyboard, with punched paper tape, line-width gauge, and drumlike justification scale visible at top. Also shown here are the various QWERTY keyboards used for roman, italic, bold, or small capital letters as required. The red numeric keys (at the top left of the keyboard) are used to punch the computed justification parameters at the end of the line. For more than half a century, printing was dominated by Linotypes, Monotypes, and a host of copycat devices.

Sholes’s nameless hyphen / dash / minus sign (-) had to carry the load for the em, en, figure, and quotation dashes and all their visual relatives. Typographic propriety had suffered an ignominious blow: from a suite of dashes for every occasion, writers were reduced to using and reusing this single character wherever any faintly dashlike symbol might ordinarily have appeared. Figure 8.4 An illustration of an early QWERTY keyboard taken from Sholes’s 1878 patent, with the hyphen-minus character third from the right on the top row. The dashlike character at top-right is actually an underscore.70 Still, though, typists adapted. Even before the nineteenth century was out, Isaac Pitman, inventor of Pitman shorthand, proponent of phonetic spelling, and a steadfastly unsentimental sort of chap, declared that a single, spaced hyphen - or preferably, two unspaced hyphens--would serve perfectly well in place of the absent em dash.71 The practice was not universally admired: the dime novelist William Wallace Cook was one early voice of protest, writing in 1912 that he considered it “poor policy” to be forced into using two hyphens where an em dash should rightly be placed.72 Despite Cook’s misgivings, Pitman’s shortcut was persistent.

pages: 722 words: 90,903

Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought
by Drew Neil
Published 6 Oct 2012

Set yourself the goal of adding a couple of motions to your repertoire each week. Tip 46 Keep Your Fingers on the Home Row Vim is optimized for the touch typist. Learn to move around without removing your hands from the home row, and you’ll be able 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. When poised in this position, we can reach for any other key on the keyboard without having to move our hands or look at our fingers. It’s the ideal posture for touch typing. Just as with any other text editor, Vim lets us use the arrow keys to move the cursor around, but it also provides an alternative by way of the h, j, k, and l keys.

And the l key doesn’t move left, it moves right! The keys are assigned this way for historical reasons, so don’t go looking hard for a logical pattern.[15] Here are a few pointers that 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 h, j, k, and l may seem unintuitive at first, learning to use them is worth your while. To reach for the arrow keys, you have to move your hand away from its resting place on the home row.

That might sound like a trivial saving, but it adds up. Once you’ve acquired the habit of using h, j, k, and l to move around, using any other editor that depends on the arrow 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 press the h key, but we have to reach for it. Some people see this as a problem, and as a solution they recommend shifting your entire right hand one step to the left so that h, j, k, and l are each covered by a finger.

Practical Vim, Second Edition (for Stefano Alcazi)
by Drew Neil

Tip 47 Keep Your Fingers on the Home Row Vim is optimized for the touch typist. Learn to move around without removing your hands from the home row, and you’ll be able 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. When poised in this position, we can reach for any other key on the keyboard without having to move our hands or look at our fingers. It’s the ideal posture for touch typing. Just as with any other text editor, Vim lets us use the arrow keys to move the cursor around, but it also provides an alternative by way of the h, j, k, and l keys.

And the l key doesn’t move left, it moves right! The keys are assigned this way for historical reasons, so don’t go looking hard for a logical pattern.[15] Here are a few pointers that 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 h, j, k, and l may seem unintuitive at first, learning to use them is worth your while. To reach for the arrow keys, you have to move your hand away from its resting place on the home row.

That might sound like a trivial saving, but it adds up. Once you’ve acquired the habit of using h, j, k, and l to move around, using any other editor that depends on the arrow 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 press the h key, but we have to reach for it. Some people see this as a problem, and as a solution they recommend shifting your entire right hand one step to the left so that h, j, k, and l are each covered by a finger.

pages: 324 words: 89,875

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy
by Alex Moazed and Nicholas L. Johnson
Published 30 May 2016

But within a few years, the company had become a punch line. As with Nokia, it is easy to blame RIM’s decline on bad management. Lazaridis and Balsillie certainly didn’t help their own case, making a number of public statements over the years about their industry that in hindsight were obviously wrong. For example, Lazaridis famously called QWERTY keyboards “the most exciting mobile trend” at the very moment when RIM’s new touchscreen competitors, the iPhone and Android, were starting to eat its lunch.6 Conventional narratives about the decline of the BlackBerry are often based on this explanation. Lazaridis and Balsillie stuck around too long.

As future CEO Heins would later say, the company had a very clear idea what its core product was all about.7 The BlackBerry was focused on battery life, ease of typing, security, and data compression. And on those counts it delivered. Its BlackBerry Messenger application also was a major hit, giving the phone its “killer app.” Over the next half decade, the BlackBerry became the leading smartphone, famous for its reliability and security as well as its iconic QWERTY keyboard. For professionals, the BlackBerry was a must-have, and in popular culture, the phone seemed to be everywhere. Presidents, prime ministers, CEOs, and celebrities across the globe swore by their BlackBerries. There was even a term invented for the growing ranks of BlackBerry addicts—“Crackberry”—which inspired its own website.

It was competing with Android’s entire ecosystem of producers, which was growing exponentially. The trouble was immediate at RIM. The company missed its earnings estimate in the first and second quarters of 2008. But rather than change course, RIM’s response was to double down on its old strategy. It released the BlackBerry Bold, which featured better specs and the company’s usual QWERTY keyboard and trackball. Not surprisingly, the Bold failed to stem the tide. October 2008 was the first month where the iPhone outsold the BlackBerry, selling 6.9 million units to BlackBerry’s 6.1 million.11 And there was no looking back. Business at Apple was booming. “Apple just reported one of the best quarters in its history, with a spectacular performance by the iPhone,” CEO Steve Jobs said at the time.

Practical Vim
by Drew Neil

Tip 47 Keep Your Fingers on the Home Row Vim is optimized for the touch typist. Learn to move around without removing your hands from the home row, and you’ll be able 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. When poised in this position, we can reach for any other key on the keyboard without having to move our hands or look at our fingers. It’s the ideal posture for touch typing. Just as with any other text editor, Vim lets us use the arrow keys to move the cursor around, but it also provides an alternative by way of the h, j, k, and l keys.

And the l key doesn’t move left, it moves right! The keys are assigned this way for historical reasons, so don’t go looking hard for a logical pattern.[15] Here are a few pointers that 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 h, j, k, and l may seem unintuitive at first, learning to use them is worth your while. To reach for the arrow keys, you have to move your hand away from its resting place on the home row.

That might sound like a trivial saving, but it adds up. Once you’ve acquired the habit of using h, j, k, and l to move around, using any other editor that depends on the arrow 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 press the h key, but we have to reach for it. Some people see this as a problem, and as a solution they recommend shifting your entire right hand one step to the left so that h, j, k, and l are each covered by a finger.

pages: 345 words: 75,660

Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence
by Ajay Agrawal , Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb
Published 16 Apr 2018

The QWERTY design has persisted even though the mechanism that caused all the trouble is no longer relevant. When Apple engineers designed the iPhone, they debated whether to finally get rid 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 soft keyboard.6 But as late as 2006 (the iPhone was launched in 2007), the keyboard was terrible. Not only could it not compete with the BlackBerry, but it was so frustrating that no one would use it to type a text message, let alone an email.

Many Apple engineers came up with designs that moved away from QWERTY. With just three weeks to find a solution—a solution that, if not found, might have killed the whole project—every single iPhone 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. When you type a “t,” it is highly probable the next letter will be an “h” and so the area around that key expanded. Following that, “e” and “i” expanded, and so on.

See also jobs “Lady Lovelace’s Objection,” 13 Lambrecht, Anja, 196 language translation, 25–27, 107–108 laws of robotics, 115 learning -by-using, 182–183 in the cloud vs. on the ground, 188–189, 202 experience and, 191 in-house and on-the-job, 185 language translation, 26–27 pathways to, 182–184 privacy and data for, 189–190 reinforcement, 13, 145, 183–184 by simulation, 187–188 strategy for, 179–194 supervised, 183 trade-offs in performance and, 181–182 when to deploy and, 184–187 Lederman, Mara, 168–169 Lee, Kai-Fu, 219 Lee Se-dol, 8 legal documents, redacting, 53–54, 68 legal issues, 115–117 Lewis, Michael, 56 Li, Danielle, 58 liability, 117, 195–198 lighting, cost of, 11 London cabbies, 76–78 Lovelace, Ada, 12, 13 Lyft, 88–89 Lytvyn, Max, 96 machine learning, 18 adversarial, 187–188 churn prediction and, 32–36 complexity and, 103–110 from data, 45–47 feedback for, 46–47 flexibility in, 36 judgment and, 83 one-shot, 60 regression compared with, 32–35 statistics and prediction and, 37–40 techniques, 8–9 transformation of prediction by, 37–40 Mailmobile, 103 management AI’s impact on, 3 by exception, 67–68 Mastercard, 25 mathematics, made cheap by computers, 12, 14 Mazda, 124 MBA programs, student recruitment for, 127–129, 133–139 McAfee, Andrew, 91 Mejdal, Sig, 161 Microsoft, 9–10, 176, 180, 202–204, 215, 217 Tay chatbot, 204–205 mining, automation in, 112–114 Misra, Sanjog, 93–94 mobile-first strategy, 179–180 Mobileye, 15 modeling, 99, 100–102 Moneyball (Lewis), 56, 161–162 monitoring of predictions, 66–67 multivariate regression, 33–34 music, digital, 12, 61 Musk, Elon, 209, 210, 221 Mutual Benefit Life, 124–125 Napster, 61 NASA, 14 National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), 222–223 navigation apps, 77–78, 88–90, 106 Netscape, 9–10 neural networks, 13 New Economy, 10 New York City Fire Department, 197 New York Times, 8, 218 Nordhaus, William, 11 Norvig, Peter, 180 Nosko, Chris, 199 Novak, Sharon, 169–170 Numenta, 223 Nymi, 201 Oakland Athletics, 56, 161–162 Obama, Barack, 217–218 objectives, identifying, 139 object recognition, 7, 28–29 Olympics, Rio, 114–115 omitted variables, 62 one-shot learning, 60 On Intelligence (Hawkins), 39 Open AI, 210 optimization, search engine, 64 oracles, 23 organizational structure, 161–162 Osborne, Michael, 149 Otto, 157–158 outcomes in decision making, 74–76, 134–138 job redesign and, 142 outsourcing, 169–170, 171 Page, Larry, 179 Paravisini, Daniel, 66–67 pattern recognition, 145–147 Pavlov, Ivan, 183 payoff calculations, 78–81 in drug discovery, 136 judgment in, 87–88 Pell, Barney, 2 performance, trade-offs between learning and, 181–182, 187 performance reviews, 172–173 photography digital, 14 sports, automation of, 114–115 Pichai, Sundar, 179–180 Piketty, Thomas, 213 Pilbara, Australia, mining in, 112–114 policy, 3, 210 power calculations, 48 prediction, 23–30 about the present, 23–24 behavior affected by, 23 bias in, 34–35 complements to, 15 consequences of cheap, 29 credit card fraud prevention and, 24–25 in decision making, 74–76, 134–138 definition of, 13, 24 by exception, 67–68 human strengths in, 60 human weaknesses in, 54–58 improvements in, 25–29 as intelligence, 2–3, 29, 31–41 in language translation, 25–27 machine weaknesses in, 58–65 made cheap, 13–15 selling, 176–177 techniques, 13 unanticipated correlations and, 36–37 of what a human would do, 95–102 predictive text, 130 preferences, 88–90, 96–97, 98 selling consumer, 176–177 presidential elections, 59 prices effects of reduced AI, 9–11 human judgment in, 100 sales causality and, 63–64 for ZipRecruiter, 93–94 privacy issues, 19, 49, 98 China and, 219–220 country differences in, 219–221 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), 123–134 regression, 13 failures of, 36–37 multivariate, 33–34 in predicting churn, 32–35 reinforcement learning, 13, 145, 183–184 Rekimoto, Jun, 26 research and development, 218–221 return on investment (ROI), 156, 198–199 reverse causality, 62 reverse-engineering, 202–204 reward function, 79–80, 172–173 engineering, 92–94, 174 strategy alignment and, 162 Rio Tinto, 113–114 risks and risk management, 19, 195–206 biases in job ads and, 195–198 decision making and, 108–109 liability and, 195–198 quality and, 198–199 security, 199–205 society and, 209–224 Rivers, Lynn, 218–219 Robotlandia, 211 robots Asimov’s laws of robotics and, 115 grasping problem with, 144–145 if-then logic and, 104–109 mail delivery, 103 moon-based, 115 quick responses and, 114–115 uncertainty problems and, 103–104 Rockefeller Foundation, 31 Roomba, 104 Rose, Geordie, 145 Rosenberg, Nathan, 182–183 Rumsfeld, Donald, 58 Rush (rock band), 73 Russakovsky, Olga, 28–29 Russia, 217 sabermetrics, 56, 161–162 Salesforce, 190 satisficing, 107–109 scale, 67 Schoar, Antoinette, 66–67 school bus drivers, 149–150 Schumpeter, Joseph, 215 search engines, 50, 64, 216 security risks, 199–205 self-driving vehicles.

Know Thyself
by Stephen M Fleming
Published 27 Apr 2021

In the more prosaic language of neuroscience, we offload well-learned tasks to unconscious, subordinate levels of action control, intervening only where necessary.4 Not all of us can engage in the finger acrobatics required for playing Chopin or Liszt. But many of us regularly engage in a similarly remarkable motor skill on another type of keyboard. I am writing this book on a laptop equipped with a standard QWERTY keyboard, named for the first six letters of the top row. The history of why the QWERTY keyboard, designed by politician and amateur inventor Christopher Latham Sholes in the 1860s, came into being is murky (the earliest typewriters instead had all twenty-six letters of the alphabet organized in a row from A to Z, which its inventors assumed would be the most efficient arrangement).

We know this because one of the easiest ways to screw up someone’s typing is to ask them to type only the letters in a sentence that would normally be typed by the left (or right) hand. Try sitting at a keyboard and typing only the left-hand letters in the sentence “The cat on the mat” (on a QWERTY keyboard you should produce something like “Tecatteat,” depending on whether you normally hit the space bar with your right or left thumb). It is a fiendishly difficult and frustrating task to assign letters to hands. And yet the lower-level loop controlling our keystrokes does this continuously, at up to seventy words per minute!

pages: 476 words: 125,219

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy
by Robert W. McChesney
Published 5 Mar 2013

Technologies reinforce the status quo once a communication regime is put in place. Technologies are “path dependent,” meaning that once they are in place with a certain technological standard, it is very difficult and expensive to replace them unless there is a major technological revolution, even if they have considerable flaws. We still live with the limitations of the QWERTY keyboard, to take one example, though the rationale for that system disappeared generations ago.31 Likewise, communication technologies invariably have unintended consequences—the more significant the technology, the greater the unintended consequences. Both of these features point to the need for as careful and thoughtful an approach to communication policy making as possible.

Also not surprisingly, the impetus for this change is due as much to commercial imperatives as it is to the nature of the technology. See Alexandra Alter, “Your E-Book Is Reading You,” Wall Street Journal, July 19, 2012. 29. Carr, Shallows, 116. 30. John Naughton, What You Really Need to Know About the Internet: From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg (London: Quercus, 2012). 31. The QWERTY keyboard was designed to slow down typists so early typewriters could function without the keys jamming. If a keyboard were to be designed for optimal efficiency, it would use a different layout. 32. Cited in Rebecca MacKinnon, Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 53. 33.

See CEOs’ pay; wages PayPal, 138, 141, 164 pay-per-view model, 147 paywalls, 186–87 PCs. See personal computers The Penguin and the Leviathan (Benkler), 6–7 Pentagon. See U.S. Department of Defense Pentagon Papers, 169 Peoria Journal-Star, 177 periodicals, 93, 156, 176, 205, 237n15. See also newspapers; press subsidies personal computers, 101, 135, 218. See also QWERTY keyboard; tablet computers personalized advertising, 188 personalized news stories, 187–88 Philadelphia, 176–77 Philadelphia Inquirer, 176, 177 Philippines, 192–93 Phillips, Kevin, 18 phone industry. See telephone industry phone tapping. See wiretapping photo repositories, digital. See digital photo repositories Pickett, Kate, 36 Pierson, Paul, 30 piracy, fear of, 123, 125, 126.

Autonomous Driving: How the Driverless Revolution Will Change the World
by Andreas Herrmann , Walter Brenner and Rupert Stadler
Published 25 Mar 2018

Norms and standards can also improve the confidence of potential customers, as people can be unsettled by competition between companies for the right or wrong technological basis (see Box 24.1). Box 24.1. Characterisation of Standards Good Standards, Bad Standards Standards can not only accelerate the innovation process, but also strengthen a company’s market position with its products. The QWERTY keyboard configuration illustrates how a suboptimal technology gained almost total acceptance. The Remington Arms Company received complaints that their typewriters often jammed when typists worked too rapidly. To solve this problem, a Remington engineer had the idea of separating commonly connected letters, such as q and u.

Dvorak subsequently developed a more efficient keyboard, where the right hand does more typing than the left and most typing is carried out on the home and middle row of the keys, including the most common letters. Cassingham [20] estimates that professional typists are 20 per cent faster using a Dvorak keyboard and that, during an eight-hour day, a typist’s hand travels 16 times further on a QWERTY keyboard than on a Dvorak one. Yet, puzzlingly, 99 per cent of all current keyboards are QWERTYbased. QWERTY was a standard for more than 20 years before Dvorak’s keyboard appeared. Norms and Standards 243 The development of the Boeing 777 is an example of how the standardisation of data transfer between the companies involved in a project can significantly reduce costs and time.

The product core can then be standardized; economies of scale can be created in production and marketing. Firms entering the industry during exploratory phases can be led down the wrong technological path, but have tremendous winning potential if they choose the right one. As the example of the QWERTY keyboards shows, dominant designs don’t have to be better than alternative architectures [20]. They simply embody a set of key features and functions that come together at a certain time due to technological path dependence and need not be based on functionality, practicality or customer preference. With autonomous driving, the debate about the dominant design plays a particularly important role in the development of V-to-V communication (Declaration of Amsterdam).

pages: 528 words: 146,459

Computer: A History of the Information Machine
by Martin Campbell-Kelly and Nathan Ensmenger
Published 29 Jul 2013

On the very first machines, the letters of the keyboard had been arranged in alphabetical order, and the major cause of the jamming was the proximity of commonly occurring letter pairs (such as D and E, or S and T). The easiest way 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 the sequence FGHJKL appears.) Densmore made two attempts to get the Sholes typewriter manufactured by small engineering workshops, but they both lacked the necessary capital and skill to manufacture successfully and cheaply.

Palm never achieved more than a 3 percent market share and was quickly overshadowed in its primary market—business users—by Research in Motion (RIM), a Canadian specialist in paging, messaging, data capture, and modem equipment that launched the 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 smartphones became consumer oriented and the touchscreen-based Apple iOS and Android systems rose to dominance. While Apple’s Macintosh was a technical success at its launch in 1984, it helped Microsoft far more than Apple itself (by showing the dominant operating-system company the way to a user-friendly graphics-based operating system).

The most recent biography of Watson is Kevin Maney’s The Maverick and His Machine (2003). JoAnne Yates’ Structuring the Information Age (2005) is an important account of how interactions between IBM and its 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. 133. Page 23“reporters, lawyers, editors, authors, and clergymen”: Cortada 1993a, p. 16. Page 23“Gentlemen: Please do not use my name”: Quoted in Bliven 1954, p. 62.

pages: 580 words: 125,129

Androids: The Team That Built the Android Operating System
by Chet Haase
Published 12 Aug 2021

Nick and his team realized a richer Internet experience wasn’t going to happen without a better keyboard experience. Doing anything interesting on the Web just wasn’t feasible, or pleasant, with the traditional 12-key dial pads on phones at that time.33 So the team was looking specifically for potential devices with QWERTY keyboards.34 T-Mobile was already working with RIM,35 and had convinced them to add phone capabilities to their previously data-only BlackBerry device. But the form factor of those devices (especially with the belt clip popular with those users) wasn’t going to appeal to consumers, who were looking for something less business-centric.

“I touched some other parts of the software, but most of my work went into the text display and editing system. The earliest development hardware was candybar207 phones with only a 12-key numeric keypad, which is why there is a MultiTapKeyListener class for that style of agonizingly slow text entry. Fortunately, we quickly moved on to the Sooner development hardware with a tiny QWERTY keyboard instead. On the left is the early candybar phone, nicknamed Tornado, which the team used until the later Sooner device. The phone on the right is an HTC Excalibur, which was the basis for Sooner after some industrial design modifications (and replacing the Windows Mobile OS with Android). (Picture courtesy Eric Fischer) “I made sure to handle bidirectional text layout from the beginning, which was sufficient for Hebrew, but not for Arabic.”208 Software engineers tend to get emotionally attached to their code, and that was the case for Eric, who displayed his passion in the license plate for his car.

September 23: T-Mobile G1 Announcement Google didn’t gather the media for the developer-targeted SDK launch, but they did get up on stage at a press conference in New York City with T-Mobile to announce the consumer phone that would run 1.0. The same day as the 1.0 SDK shipped, representatives talked about the new device, and T-Mobile issued a press release entitled, “T-Mobile Unveils the T-Mobile G1 –the First Phone Powered by Android.” The G1 device would have a touchscreen, a slide-to-open QWERTY keyboard, and a trackball. It would run Google Maps, search, and it would offer apps from Android Market. It would come with a three-megapixel camera and would run on T-Mobile’s new 3G network. It would sell for $179 on contract, or $399 unlocked, starting in the U.S. and expanding to other countries in the following weeks.

pages: 472 words: 80,835

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World
by David Kerrigan
Published 18 Jun 2017

We may seem largely locked-in to the human-controlled car but daunting as the change may seem, the push and pull factors for change are at least worthy of consideration. But “better” technologies don’t always automatically take over. Those who feel the human-driven car has outlived its usefulness, need to remember that less than ideal, or outdated reasons for retention of older technologies, can and do persist. For example, the QWERTY keyboard[360] was designed in the 1870s to slow down typists but is still in use today despite there no longer being any mechanical reason for it to remain. Will human drivers still be in use in future decades when they are similarly no longer required? Even assuming an unlikely smooth uptake, the journey of driverless cars to market maturity will take 20 years or more to complete.

MOD=AJPERES [348] https://www.automotiveisac.com/best-practices/ [349] https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/23/connected-car-security-separating-fear-from-fact/ [350] http://www.raymondloewy.com/about.html [351] https://www.ft.com/content/97a04f76-3494-11e7-99bd-13beb0903fa3 [352] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35301279 [353] https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2016/INCLA-PE16007-7876.PDF [354] http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/autos-driverless/ [355] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment [356] https://www.scribd.com/document/333075344/Apple-Comments-on-Federal-Automated-Vehicles-Policy [357] Remarks at Infrastructure Week, May 2017 [358] Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, Carlota Perez, 2002 [359] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2014/10/14/move-over-humans-the-robocars-are-coming/ [360] https://www.cnet.com/uk/news/a-brief-history-of-the-qwerty-keyboard/ [361] http://www.wsj.com/articles/could-self-driving-cars-spell-the-end-of-ownership-1448986572 [362] https://www.morganstanley.com/articles/autonomous-cars-the-future-is-now [363] https://www.wired.com/2016/04/american-cities-nowhere-near-ready-self-driving-cars/ [364] Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter 6 [365] http://time.com/4236980/against-human-driving/ [366] https://www.ft.com/content/e961f914-6ba3-11e6-ae5b-a7cc5dd5a28c [367] Paul Roberts, The Impulse Society: What's Wrong With Getting What We Want, 2014 [368] http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2033076,00.html [369] http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/da5d033c-8e1c-11e1-bf8f-00144feab49a.html#axzz1t4qPww6r [370] http://www.wbur.org/bostonomix/2016/04/29/traffic-future-driverless-cars

pages: 295 words: 81,861

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation
by Paris Marx
Published 4 Jul 2022

But there is so much more than that. In 1968, Douglas Engelbart showed off the oN-Line System in what has become known as “The Mother of All Demos.” Engelbart and his team had developed a number of technologies at Stanford Research Institute with ARPA funding that went on to define the computing experience: the mouse, the QWERTY keyboard, bitmapped screens, and even the ability of users at multiple sites to edit the same document simultaneously. Think of it like a very rudimentary Google Docs. These technologies, demonstrated more than fifty years ago, still make up the core of the computing experience—even as Apple promotes its products as revolutions for making minor design tweaks and spec bumps every year or two.

See also specific locations Norton, Peter, 16, 124 Norway, 81–2, 209–10 not in my backyard (NIMBY), 164 NotPetya malware, 129 Noyce, Robert, 40–1 NSF, 55 NSFNET, 50–1 Nuro, 172–3 Ofo, 170–1 oil shocks, 203–4, 226 O’Mara, Margaret, 38 oN-Line System, 54–5 Organization of American States, 76 Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, 203 Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 76–7 Oslo, Norway, 209–10 Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, 225 Page, Larry, 121 Paris, France bike lanes in, 171 highway system in, 210–1 Paris Agreement, 74 parking free, 30 in Oslo, 209–10 particulate matter, in emissions, 84–5 pedestrians cities without, 191–3 deaths of, 16–7, 31–2 jaywalkers, 124–7, 215–6 Pennsylvania, autonomous robots in, 175 personal computers, compared with automobiles, 36–7 Peters, Benjamin, 57 Pishevar, Shervin, 105 PM10, 84 Portugal, lithium mine in, 226 Prius, 122 Proposition 22 (California), 111–2 public abundance, campaign for, 222 Public Utilities Commission (PUC), 110, 111 Quayside, 229–30 Quebec, Canada, 80 QWERTY keyboard, 54–5 Radio Corporation of America (RCA), 118 rate wars, for taxis, 96 Reagan, Ronald, 45, 48 recession, 24, 182, 199 Red Party, 209 regional commercial networks, 51 Renault-Nissan, 70 renewable energy, 190 Revenge of the Electric Car (film), 70–1, 81 Rickenbacker, E.V., 151 ride-hailing services.

The Reason I Jump
by Naoki Higashida
Published 15 Jul 2013

Naoki’s autism is severe enough to make spoken communication pretty much impossible, even now. But thanks to an ambitious teacher and his own persistence, he learnt to spell out words directly onto an alphabet grid. A Japanese alphabet grid is a table of the basic forty Japanese hiragana letters, and its English counterpart is a copy of the QWERTY keyboard, drawn onto a card and laminated. Naoki communicates by pointing to the letters on these grids to spell out whole words, which a helper at his side then transcribes. These words build up into sentences, paragraphs and entire books. ‘Extras’ around the side of the grids include numbers, punctuation, and the words ‘Finished’, ‘Yes’ and ‘No’.

pages: 322 words: 88,197

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World
by Steven Johnson
Published 15 Nov 2016

The innovations that music inspired turned out to unlock other doors in the adjacent possible, in fields seemingly unrelated to music, the way the “Instrument Which Plays by Itself” carved out a pathway that led to textile design and computer software. Seeking out new sounds led us to create new tools—which invariably suggested new uses for those tools. Legendary violin maker Stradivari’s workshop Consider one of the most essential and commonly used inventions of the computer age: the QWERTY keyboard. Many of us today spend a significant portion our waking hours pressing keys with our fingertips to generate a sequence of symbols on a screen or page: typing up numbers in a spreadsheet, writing e-mails, or tapping out texts on virtual keyboards displayed on smartphone screens. Anyone who works at a computer all day likely spends far more time interacting with keyboards than with more celebrated modern inventions like automobiles.

See also computer technology computer networks of the early 1990s, 170 digital simulations that trigger emotions, 184–85 frequency hopping, 100–101 global creation, 201–202 “global village” of Minecraft, 201 as illustrated in the work of Banu Masu and al-Jazari, 3–5, 4 multiplane camera, 179–81, 180 music’s role in developing, 91–92, 100–101 QWERTY keyboard, 86–87 textiles “Calico Madams,” 28 cotton, 26–28 East India Company, 28 economic fears regarding the import of, 28–29 French weaving industry, 79–83 inventions to aid in the production of fabric, 29, 30 Jacquard loom, 80–83, 81 vivid colors of chintz and calico, 26–27, 27 theft.

pages: 416 words: 106,582

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking
by John Brockman
Published 14 Feb 2012

In addition, the first row was provided with all of the letters in the word “typewriter,” so that salesmen, new to typing, could type the word using just one row. Quickly, however, mechanical improvements made faster typing possible, and new keyboards placing letters according to frequency were presented. But it was too late: There was no going back. By the 1890s, typists across America were used to QWERTY keyboards, having learned to zip away on new versions of them that did not stick so easily. Retraining them would have been expensive and, ultimately, unnecessary, so QWERTY was passed down the generations, and even today we use the queer QWERTY configuration on computer keyboards, where jamming is a mechanical impossibility.

Z., 6–8 naming and labeling, 62–64, 190–91 natural selection, 2, 7, 16, 25, 34, 44, 84, 99, 109, 136, 137–38, 172, 196, 243 sexual, 228, 353–54 nature vs. nurture, 154, 156 negative capability, 225 nervous system, 130, 346, 373 cycles in, 171–72 networks: collective intelligence and, 257–58 neural, 188–90, 258 social, 82, 262, 266 neural networks, 188–90, 258 neuroeconomics, 208 neurons, 82, 129, 130, 149, 172, 395 entanglement of, 330 synapses and, 164 neuroplasticity, 250–51 neuroscience, 208, 250 neurotransmitters, 229–30, 279, 346 Newton, Isaac, 9, 34, 64, 72, 109, 192–93 nexus causality, 34–35 Niesta, Daniela, 150 Nisbett, Richard, 120–23 nominal fallacy, 62, 64 nonlinearity, 184–85 Nonzero (Wright), 97 Nørretranders, Tor, 226–28 Novum Organum (Bacon), 395 Nowak, Martin, 99 nuclear bomb, 185–86 nuclear transfer, 56 numbers, rounded, 182 Obama, Barack, 204 Obrist, Hans Ulrich, 118–19 Ockham’s razor, 324–27 O’Donnell, James, 127–28 Oedipus, 33 oil industry, 209 Olber’s paradox, 301 Olson, Randy, 269 On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 359 openness, 232–33 open systems, 86–87 opinions, 267, 268, 270 ordinariness, in dual view of ourselves, 32 Origgi, Gloria, xxviii, 318–20 Ortega y Gasset, José, 229 Orwell, George, 33 Osler, William, 109 otherness, 292–93 Otto, Nikolaus, 170 oxytocin, 230 Pagel, Mark, 340–42 Paine, Robert, 174 Pakistan, 20 Panofsky, Erwin, 247–48 Papuans, 361–62 paradigms, 242–45 paradoxes, 301–2 parallelism in art and commerce, 307–9 Pareto, Vilfredo, 198–99 Pareto Principle, xxvii, 198–200 Parkinson’s disease, 63 particles: entangled, 330–31 wave duality, 28, 296–98 path dependence, 285–88 pattern finding, 105, 107, 394 Paul, Gregory, 268–70 Pauling, Linus, 269 Pauly, Daniel, 90 PDFs (partially diminished fractions), 206 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 112, 113, 114, 222 Pepperberg, Irene, 160–61 perception, 43, 133 cognition and, 133–34 see also senses PERMA, 92–93 personality, 229, 230–31 character traits in, 229 insanity and, 232–34 temperament dimensions in, 229–31 pessimistic meta-induction from the history of science, 30–31 Pettenkofer, Max, 338, 339 phase transitions, 371–72 philosophy, 271, 275 phlogiston, 360 physicians, 36 physics, 221, 222–23, 234, 277, 322 supervenience and, 364 see also quantum mechanics Pickover, Clifford, 109–11 Pinker, Steven, xxv, xxx, 94–97 Pizarro, David, 394 placebo and placebo effects, 379, 381–85 Plato, 9, 34, 221–22 Platonism, 222 Poe, Edgar Allan, 301 political systems, 157–58, 159 politicians, 50 polywater, 243 Pondicherry, 389–90 Pöppel, Ernst, 395–97 positive-sum games, 94–97 powers of 10, 162–64 pragmamorphism, 115 predictability, 103–4 randomness and, 105–8 predictions, 261 predictive coding, 132–34 prions, 240 priors, 219 privacy, 262 probability, 52, 65–67, 147, 149, 356, 378, 379 risks and, 68–71 problems, wicked, 203–5 procrastination, 209–10 projective thinking, 240–41 prokaryotic cells, 157 proof, 355–57 Provine, Robert R., 84 Prusiner, Stanley, 240 psychiatry, 232, 233–34, 235, 279 psychotherapy, 41–42 public policy, 93 experiments in, 26, 273–74 uncertainty and, 54, 56 QED moments, 355–57 quantum gravity, 297–98 quantum mechanics, 25, 114, 192–93, 234, 322, 356 entanglement in, 330–32 “many worlds” interpretation of, 69–70 thought experiments in, 28 wave-particle duality in, 28, 296–98 quantum tunneling, 297 quarks, 190–91, 297 Quaternary mass extinction, 362 QWERTY keyboards, 285–86 Ramachandran, V. S., 242–45 Randall, Lisa, 192–93 randomness, 105–8 rational unconscious, 146–49 ratios, 186 Read, Leonard, 258 realism, naïve, 214 Reality Club, xxix recursive structure, 246–49 reductionism, 278 Rees, Martin, 1–2 regression, 235 ARISE and, 235–36 relationalism, 223 relativism, 223, 300 relativity, 25, 64, 72, 234, 297 religion, 5, 6, 114 creationism, 268–69 self-transcendence and, 212–13 supernatural beings in, 182–83 and thinking in time vs. outside of time, 222 repetition, in manufacture, 171 replicability, 373–75 Revkin, Andrew, 386–88 Ridley, Matt, 257–58 risk, 56–57, 68–71, 339 security theater and, 262 statistical thinking and, 260 risk aversion, 339 risk literacy, 259–61 Ritchie, Matthew, 237–39 Robertson, Pat, 10 Roman Empire, 128 root-cause analysis, 303–4 Rosen, Jay, 203–5 Rovelli, Carlo, 51–52 Rowan, David, 305–6 Rucker, Rudy, 103–4 Rushkoff, Douglas, 41–42 Russell, Bertrand, 123 Rwanda, 345 Saatchi, Charles, 307–8 safety, proving, 281 Saffo, Paul, 334–35 Sagan, Carl, 273, 282 Sakharov, Andrei, 88 Salcedo-Albarán, Eduardo, 345–48 Sampson, Scott D., 289–91 Sapolsky, Robert, 278–80 Sasselov, Dimitar, 13–14, 292–93 SAT tests, 47, 89 scale analysis, 184–87 scale transitions, 371–72 scaling laws, 162 Schank, Roger, 23–24 Schmidt, Eric, 305 schools, see education Schrödinger’s cat, 28 Schulz, Kathryn, 30–31 science, 192–93 discoveries in, 109–11, 240–41, 257 humanities and, 364–66 method of, 273–74 normal, 242–43, 244 pessimistic meta-induction from history of, 30–31 replicability in, 373–75 statistically significant difference and, 378–80 theater vs., 262–63 scientific concept, 19, 22 scientific lifestyle, 19–22 scientific proof, 51, 52 scuba divers, 40 seconds, 163 security engineering, 262 security in information-sharing, 75–76 Segre, Gino, 28–29 Sehgal, Tino, 119 Seife, Charles, 105–8 Sejnowski, Terrence, 162–64 self, 212 ARISE and, 235–36 consciousness, 217 Other and, 292–93 separateness of, 289–91 subselves and the modular mind, 129–31 transcendence of, 212–13 self-control, 46–48 self-model, 214 self-serving bias, 37–38, 40 Seligman, Martin, 92–93 Semelweiss, Ignaz, 36 senses, 43, 139–42 umwelt and, 143–45 sensory desktop, 135–38 September 11 attacks, 386 serendipity, 101–2 serotonin, 230 sexuality, 78 sexual selection, 228, 353–54 Shamir, Adi, 76 SHAs (shorthand abstractions), xxx, 228, 277, 395–97 graceful, 120–23 Shepherd, Jonathan, 274 Shermer, Michael, 157–59 shifting baseline syndrome, 90–91 Shirky, Clay, xxvii, 198, 338 signal detection theory, 389–93 Signal Detection Theory and Psychophysics (Green and Swets), 391 signals, 228 Simon, Herbert, 48 simplicity, 325–27 skeptical empiricism, 85 skepticism, 242, 243, 336 skydivers, 39 Smallberg, Gerald, 43–45 smell, sense of, 139–42, 143–44 Smith, Adam, 258 Smith, Barry C., 139–42 Smith, Hamilton, 166 Smith, Laurence C., 310–11 Smith, John Maynard, 96 Smolin, Lee, 221–24 social microbialism, 16 social networks, 82, 262, 266 social sciences, 273 Socrates, 340 software, 80, 246 Solomon Islands, 361 something for nothing, 84 specialness, see uniqueness and specialness Sperber, Dan, 180–83 spider bites, 68, 69, 70 spoon bending, 244 stability, 128 Standage, Tom, 281 stars, 7, 128, 301 statistically significant difference, 378–80 statistics, 260, 356 stem-cell research, 56, 69–70 stock market, 59, 60–61, 151, 339 Flash Crash and, 60–61 Pareto distributions and, 199, 200 Stodden, Victoria, 371–72 stomach ulcers, 240 Stone, Linda, 240–41 stress, 68, 70, 71 string theories, 113, 114, 299, 322 subselves and the modular mind, 129–31 success, failure and, 79–80 sun, 1, 7, 11, 164 distance between Earth and, 53–54 sunk-cost trap, 121 sunspots, 110 Superorganism, The (Hölldobler and Wilson), 196–97 superorganisms, 196 contingent, 196–97 supervenience, 276, 363–66 Susskind, Leonard, 297 Swets, John, 391 symbols and images, 152–53 synapses, 164 synesthesia, 136–37 systemic equilibrium, 237–39 Szathmáry, Eörs, 96 Taleb, Nassim, 315 TANSTAAFL (“There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”), 84 Tapscott, Don, 250–53 taste, 140–42 tautologies, 355–56 Taylor, F.

pages: 413 words: 106,479

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language
by Gretchen McCulloch
Published 22 Jul 2019

.”* Here’s a few patterns we can observe in keysmash: Almost always begins with “a” Often begins with “asdf” Other common subsequent characters are g, h, j, k, l, and ;, but less often in that order, and often alternating or repeating within this second group Frequently occurring characters are the “home row” of keys that the fingers are on in rest position, suggesting that keysmashers are also touch typists If any characters appear beyond the middle row, top-row characters (qwe . . .) are more common than bottom-row characters (zxc . . .) Generally either all lowercase or all caps, and rarely contains numbers Sure, a lot of these patterns relate to the fact that we’re mashing on the home row of the QWERTY keyboard rather than using random-letter generators, but they’re reinforced by our social expectations. I conducted an informal survey, asking if people retype their keysmash if it doesn’t look, er, smashing enough. While there were a few keysmash purists, who posted whatever came out, I found that the majority of people will delete and remash if they don’t like what it looks like, plus a significant minority who will adjust a few letters.

The hash mark itself, also known as the number sign, pound sign, or octothorpe, dates back hundreds of years, originally a hastily written version of the abbreviation lb from Latin libra pondo, “a pound by weight,” as in 3# potatoes @ 10¢/#. In the early days of the internet, the hash mark, as a relatively underutilized symbol available on a standard QWERTY keyboard, was repurposed for a variety of technical functions. One of these was organizational. In chatrooms, you could type in “join #canada” or “join #hamradio” to talk with Canadians or ham radio enthusiasts. On the early social bookmarking site del.icio.us and the early photo-sharing site Flickr, you could “tag” your links or pictures with relevant categories like #funny or #sunset, borrowing a metaphor from how a tag on a shirt labels it with metadata about its price or creator.

pages: 210 words: 42,271

Programming HTML5 Applications
by Zachary Kessin
Published 9 May 2011

In many cases, on a mobile device, changing the input type will also cause the device to put up a custom keyboard to enable the user to enter the right kind of data. For instance, if type is set to number, the device can put up a numeric keypad. For a type of tel, the device can put up a numeric keypad that looks a little different but is optimized for entering phone numbers. For a type of email, the keyboard will be a standard QWERTY keyboard but modified for the entry of email addresses. One input type that is especially useful for smartphone applications is the speech input type: <input type="text" x-webkit-speech/>. The speech tag will take what the user said and translate it into text. My Android phone, for instance, has a Google Search widget that can search by voice.

pages: 456 words: 123,534

The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution
by Charles R. Morris
Published 1 Jan 2012

The idea of an individual key for each letter was turned into a working solution primarily by a former newspaper editor, Christopher Sholes, in Milwaukee. On a third try, he produced a small number of working machines that outpaced manual scribes, one of which, from 1872–1873, survives. It is recognizably a modern mechanical typewriter, complete with a QWERTY keyboard. (The original keyboard was in alphabetical order, but Sholes realized that when closely spaced keys, like s and t, were struck in sequence, they tended to jam. The QWERTY sequence was the random outcome of multiple key rearrangements to reduce high-frequency, closely spaced sequences. The DFGH sequence in the middle row is a remnant of the original layout.)

The new company, the Standard Typewriter Company, renamed itself Remington Typewriter in 1902 and was later part of Sperry Rand. Early Surviving Scholes Typewriter, c. 1872–1873. The typewriter developed primarily by a Milwaukee editor, Christopher Scholes, was the first to look like a recognizable modern typewriter. Note the QWERTY keyboard. Schole’s first keyboard was alphabetical, but closely-spaced frequent companion letters tended to jam. The new keyboard arrangement was the random outcome of Schole’s trial-and-error method of addressing the problem. By the 1890s, there was a host of competitors—Hall Typewriters, American Writing Machine, Oliver, L.

pages: 451 words: 125,201

What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View
by William MacAskill
Published 31 Aug 2022

Because these multiply, we can intuitively compare different longterm effects: between two alternatives, if one is ten times as persistent as another, that will outweigh the alternative being eight times as significant. To illustrate, suppose that we’re in the late nineteenth century and the world is currently on track to use QWERTY keyboards, but if we choose to, we can shift the world to use Dvorak keyboards.5 In the table below, I’ll use X’s to represent the course of the counterfactual possible world p where we make Dvorak the standard, and I’ll use O’s to represent the course of the status quo world q, where QWERTY is the standard, until time period 4, when Dvorak becomes the standard.

That is, p and q could also be propositions that specify (at least) for how long the world would be in state s and how much value this would contribute. (Such propositions could in turn be cashed out as sets of possible worlds in which they are true, though this is not required to use the SPC framework.) 5. I use this example to illustrate, although the claim that QWERTY keyboards are an example of bad lock-in seems spurious. It’s often claimed that the QWERTY layout was designed to slow down users of typewriters in order to prevent jams, but this is an urban legend. And evidence for Dvorak’s superiority is scant; rather, Dvorak’s reputation seems to be largely the product of advertising and biased studies run by August Dvorak himself (Liebowitz and Margolis 1990). 6.

pages: 436 words: 76

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor
by John Kay
Published 24 May 2004

In the most famous metaphor of chaos theory, a butterfly flapping its wings provokes a tornado thousands of miles away and days later. 18 Systems in which initial conditions affect subsequent behavior indefinitely are path dependent. 19 Path dependency is why the film industry is still based in Hollywood. The design of our computer keyboards is path dependent: the QWERTY layout was devised in the earliest days of typewriting, and although it is ergonomically inefficient, users are familiar with it and the number of QWERTY keyboards and typists is too large to make any change possible. 20 The coevolution of technology and institutions-the development of the social and economic infrastructure of rich states-has been path dependent. But path dependency in which outcomes are sensitive to small details-the problem of the butterfly and the tornado-is fatal to forecasting.

Path dependency then took over. Countries made choices dictated by their colonial masters, or by larger countries in close proximity. It is now unlikely that any major country will switch-the last to change was Sweden, which moved from left to right during one extraordinary night in 1967. The QWERTY keyboard layout is another example of a path dependent solution to a coordination problem. Standards, like keyboard layouts, are everywhere. Currency is a standard. So is Ianguage. We need to use the same money, the same words, as the people around us. Television sets need to be compatible with television broadcasts.

Victorian Internet
by Tom Standage
Published 1 Jan 1998

Members of the royal family also had their own private lines installed. Another popular automatic system was devised by David Hughes, a professor of music in Kentucky. Appropriately enough, given his musical background, the Hughes printer, launched in 1855, had a pianolike keyboard with alternating white and black keys, one for each letter (the modern QWERTY keyboard was not invented until twenty years later). It worked on a similar principle to that of the ABC telegraph, but with a constantly rotating "chariot," driven by clockwork, which was stopped in its tracks whenever a key was held down at the sending station. At the same moment an electromagnet activated a hammer, printing a character on a paper tape.

Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage
by Roger L. Martin
Published 15 Feb 2009

In order to advance knowledge, the design thinker has to get comfortable delving into the mystery, trying to see new things or to see things in a new way. In the early days of the BlackBerry, Lazaridis saw that laptop users were demanding smaller and smaller devices, while the industry was bumping up against the size limitations of small keyboards and display screens. A standard QWERTY keyboard can only get so small before it becomes awkward and uncomfortable to use. A screen displaying all the information a user expects can be reduced only so much before it becomes unreadable or painfully cluttered. Staring at this paradox—this mystery—Lazaridis stepped back and asked what could be true.

pages: 194 words: 54,355

100 Things We've Lost to the Internet
by Pamela Paul
Published 14 Oct 2021

—one of the less taxing requirements on the road to adulthood, and, at worst, an easy B. It turns out not to have been true. Look around and you’ll find plenty of adults hunting and pecking and overtaxing their worn-out thumbs. New grown-ups don’t know how to type. Anyone who has mastered the QWERTY keyboard knows just how excruciating it is to watch someone who doesn’t know how to type, like watching the tail of a rabbit trailing sixty feet behind its nose, humans moving at a puzzlingly slow rate against the warp speed of a 5G network. You can practically see the carpal tunnel develop in the hunt-and-pecker’s tendons as they grope for the shift key.

pages: 464 words: 155,696

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader
by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli
Published 24 Mar 2015

For instance, the QWERTY keyboard has for years been the universally familiar means of typing and entering information into a computer. QWERTY, which refers to the first six keys on the left side of the third row of a keyboard, was a relic, a keyboard arrangement from the era of manual typewriters that was designed to keep the individual letter-embossing hammers from getting tangled up when the user was typing at high speed. Christie and Ording decided against altering this ubiquitous, albeit hidebound, preference. Instead, they would experiment with having a virtual QWERTY keyboard appear on the screen when you needed to type.

pages: 523 words: 154,042

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks
by Scott J. Shapiro

Because they tend to be sticky and non-ergodic, the technologies that win may not be the best-performing ones. JOS might be the superior operating system, but since Microsoft got to market first, we are all stuck with it. The costs for end users to switch operating systems are simply too high. Many inefficient technologies get entrenched simply because they were first. The classic case is the QWERTY keyboard, which was designed to slow typing on manual typewriters so that fast typists did not jam the keys. When electronic typewriters replaced manual ones and computers replaced electronic typewriters, typists still preferred QWERTY to other layouts, such as the Dvorak variant, created for fast typing, because they had originally learned on QWERTY typewriters.

The PalmPilot did not have a keyboard, so users had to learn a new way of writing with a stylus (known as Graffiti). Danger, the company that developed the Sidekick, set out to change how people used their cell phones. The first model—which they called the Hiptop, because it was chunky and surprisingly heavy, and therefore designed to be worn on the hip— not only had a QWERTY keyboard, but also a large screen that slid out to reveal a keyboard that could pivot 180 degrees. The keyboard also contained a “D-pad,” a thumb-operated four-way directional control now found on all video game controllers, with a dedicated numbers row and jump button to switch between apps. The Hiptop came with a free email account, but you could use several email accounts at the same time.

pages: 272 words: 52,204

Android 3. 0 Application Development Cookbook
by Kyle Merrifield Mew
Published 3 Aug 2011

The Configuration object provides us with many useful fields such as Configuration.orientation, which we used here and which can also take the value ORIENTATION_SQUARE. The next table contains a list of a few of the more useful Configuration fields and their associated constants: Configuration.field constants .hardKeyboardHidden HARDKEYBOARDHIDDEN_NO, HARDKEYBOARDHIDDEN_YES. .keyboard KEYBOARD_NOKEYS, KEYBOARD_QWERTY, KEYBOARD_12KEY. .navigation NAVIGATION_NONAV, NAVIGATION_DPAD, NAVIGATION_TRACKBALL, NAVIGATION_WHEEL. .navigationHidden NAVIGATIONHIDDEN_NO, NAVIGATIONHIDDEN_YES. .touchscreen TOUCHSCREEN_NOTOUCH, TOUCHSCREEN_STYLUS, TOUCHSCREEN_FINGER. These configuration fields are extremely useful when you consider that we have little idea in advance about what hardware will be available for our applications in the wild.

pages: 189 words: 57,632

Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future
by Cory Doctorow
Published 15 Sep 2008

How closely correlated have this person's value judgments been with mine in times gone by? This kind of implicit endorsement of information is a far better candidate for an information-retrieval panacea than all the world's schema combined. Amish for QWERTY (Originally published on the O'Reilly Network, 07/09/2003) I learned to type before I learned to write. The QWERTY keyboard layout is hard-wired to my brain, such that I can't write anything of significance without that I have a 101-key keyboard in front of me. This has always been a badge of geek pride: unlike the creaking pen-and-ink dinosaurs that I grew up reading, I'm well adapted to the modern reality of technology.

Kindle Fire: The Missing Manual
by Peter Meyers
Published 9 Feb 2012

For starters, there are the three biggies that every touchscreen typist nowadays expects: the Fire auto-inserts an apostrophe in common contractions (I’m, Don’t); two taps of the space bar gets you a period; and you get auto-correct for common misspellings (“teh” gets changed to “the”). Keep an eye, as well, on the row above the traditional QWERTY keyboard. Here’s where you get an ever-changing lineup of handy helpers. Before you start typing, this row sports a lineup of commonly used punctuation (exclamation point, question mark, @ sign, and so on). When you start typing, those guys disappear and in their place a horizontally swipeable row of auto-complete suggestions appear.

pages: 244 words: 66,599

Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything
by Steven Levy
Published 2 Feb 1994

Seeing this, I had to admit that anyone who learned how to play this thing would have a huge advantage over the laggards wed to our current antique. But to get this part of his system in the mainstream, Engelbart would have had to overthrow a technology entrenched more doggedly than the Maginot Line-the QWERTY typewriter keyboard. Everyone knows what a dog that interface is. If it seems like the QWERTY keyboard was laid out deliberately to slow down speed typists, that's because it was. If people typed too fast, they would overwhelm the machine-the keys would jam. So inefficiency was built in. A good idea for the nineteenth century, when text was produced by pounding a lever to make an impact on a piece of paper, but not so good a hundred years later, when hitting a key sends electrical impulses to a silicon chip.

pages: 232 words: 71,237

Kill It With Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems
by Marianne Bellotti
Published 17 Mar 2021

If a vendor replaced rm by, say, remove, then every book describing Unix would no longer apply to its system, and every shell script that calls rm would also no longer apply. Such a vendor might as well stop implementing the POSIX standard while it was at it. A century ago, fast typists were jamming their keyboards, so engineers designed the QWERTY keyboard to slow them down. Computer keyboards don’t jam, but we’re still living with QWERTY today. A century from now, the world will still be living with rm.10 Just as programmers are now writing lines of code that would fit on a punch card, they also use operating systems whose interfaces were designed to best fit teletype keyboards.

How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
by Daniel Immerwahr
Published 19 Feb 2019

That means there’s no guarantee that a non-English email or text will display correctly. Web addresses are still nearly all in ASCII, which is why the most popular website in China is accessed by typing baidu.com, not 百度.中文网. And even if it did have a Chinese web address, users would still have to use QWERTY keyboards—the global standard, designed in New York around the English alphabet—to type it. Roman characters are featured first on the search engine Baidu, the most visited web page in China. The dominance of English on the internet is, in a way, the result of free choices. No government commanded it, no army enforces it.

Bureau of Puerto Rico; annexation of; chemical weapons tests on residents of; citizenship of residents of; “commonwealth” status of; constitution of; demands for statehood of; disease in; Division of Territories and Island Possessions in charge of; English language in; governors of; on Greater United States map; hurricanes in; independence movement in; industrialization of; mainland indifference toward; medical experiments in; migration to mainland from; National Guard of; nationalism in; nuclear weapons in; population of; rebellion in; slums in; in Spanish Empire; sterilization of women in; sugar plantations in; supporters of statehood for; University of; during war with Spain; during World War II Pulitzer Prize Python coding language Quakers quality control Quapaws Quezon, Manuel Quezon City (Philippines) Quincy, Josiah Quirino, Elpidio, and family Qutb, Sayyid QWERTY keyboard Radio Free Europe Radio Liberation (later Liberty) railroads Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (Roosevelt) Rand McNally Rangoon (Burma) Rankin, Bill Ready Reference Atlas of the World Réard, Louis reconcentration Recto, Claro Red Cross Reischauer, Edwin rendition, extraordinary Republican Party; Puerto Rican Revolutionary War Rhoads, Cornelius Packard (“Dusty”) Rhodes, Cecil Rhodesia Ricarte, Gen.

pages: 209 words: 80,086

The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes
by Phillip Brown , Hugh Lauder and David Ashton
Published 3 Nov 2010

Although its innovative powers for dramatic economic change are clearly evident, it has also created chronic instability and inequality. Economists call the way countries are locked into a predetermined future “path dependency” because it’s difficult to break free of past ways of organizing various forms of economic activity. A classic example is the QWERTY keyboard, which once established makes it difficult to shift to another format. See Paul A. David, “Clio and the Economics of QWERTY,” American Economic Review, 75, no. 2 (1985): 332–337. David Kusnet, Lawrence Mishel, and Ruy Teixeira, Talking Past Each Other: What Everyday Americans Really Think (and Elites Don’t Get) about the Economy (Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute, 2006).

pages: 477 words: 75,408

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism
by Calum Chace
Published 17 Jul 2016

The essence of the plot is that the hero falls in love with his digital assistant, with intriguing consequences. Although he uses keyboards occasionally, most of the time they communicate verbally. There will be times when we want to communicate with our “friends” without making a sound. Portable “qwerty” keyboards will not suffice, and virtual hologram keyboards may take too long to arrive – and they may feel too weird to use even if and when they do arrive. Communication via brain-computer interfaces will take still longer to become feasible, so perhaps we will all have to learn a new interface – maybe a one-handed device looking something like an ocarina[cxlv].

pages: 256 words: 73,068

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next
by Jeanette Winterson
Published 15 Mar 2021

It was clunky, but alongside calls it could manage emails, and even faxes. 30 years earlier, in 1966, in her novel Rocannon’s World, sci-fi writer and general genius Ursula K. Le Guin had devised the ansible – really a texting/email device that worked between worlds. One end was fixed, the other end was portable. We would be waiting a while for that to hit Planet Earth. In 1999 Blackberry released their smartphone with the QWERTY keyboard. Like an ansible, with its keyboard and screen, the Blackberry could do calls, but its main function was email. We had to get into the 21st century for the Apple iPhone. * * * In 2007, when Apple was already making mega-money with its iPod, Steve Jobs was persuaded to ‘do’ a phone that would handle everything the iPod did, plus make calls, send emails and texts, and access the internet.

pages: 269 words: 77,876

Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit From Global Chaos
by Sarah Lacy
Published 6 Jan 2011

And that’s just for accessing the Internet over computers. The mobile Web is huge in Indonesia, and BlackBerrys—not iPhones—are the hip device. You can You can buy BlackBerry data service by the day on prepaid phones, no contract required. For those who can’t afford a BlackBerry, a local company cal ed Nexian sel s Qwerty-keyboard knockoffs from China for a fraction of the price, customized with Indonesian content like local bands and artists. In just a few years, Nexian has surged from a “nobody” to a company sel ing more than 5 mil ion handsets per year, and eating into Nokia’s market share. The Indonesian desire for keyboards—not touchscreens—isn’t surprising given that the country’s Web obsession is built on checking in, Tweeting, and messaging.

pages: 789 words: 207,744

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning
by Jeremy Lent
Published 22 May 2017

They currently exert enough power over the US legislative process to thwart meaningful legislation at the national level.63 However, even without these special interests, some structural characteristics of our global system make it very difficult to change direction. One of these is known as technological lock-in: the fact that, once a technology is widely adopted, an infrastructure is built up around it, making change prohibitively expensive. A frequently cited example is the QWERTY keyboard, which was originally designed for its inefficiency in an attempt to slow down the rate of typing and therefore prevent early typewriter keys from hitting each other. More efficiently laid-out keyboards can double typing speeds, and yet it has been impossible for them to make inroads because everyone is used to the older, inefficient design.

H., 311 Presocratics, 146, 148–49, 158, 236, 243 Priestley, Joseph, 315 Prigogine, Ilya, 366 progress human, 78, 420 moral, 432, 434, 440 technological, 410, 431, 440 Western view of, 16, 29, 400–401, 417, 434 Protestantism, 237–38, 245, 273, 346–47, 378 ethic, Protestant, 237–38, 312, 378 Puritans and, 238 Proto-Indo-European (PIE) culture, 133–39 Anatolian farming hypothesis and, 134, 624 creation myth of, 137–38 dualism, source of, 138, 489 homeland of, 133–35 Kurgan expansion, 138–39 Kurgan hypothesis and, 134, 138–39, 482–83 language family of, 133, 137, 140, 198–99, 205–207, 302 legacy of, 132–33, 140, 302 source of Greek thought, 136, 144, 150 source of Indian thought, 136, 150 source of Zoroastrian tradition, 136, 139, 150 values of, 137–38, 302, 489 See also Aryans Pseudo-Dionysius, 337 psyche, 113, 153 Ptolemy (astronomer), 319–20, 336, 337 Ptolemy (ruler), 223 Pyramid of the Sun (Mexico), 299 Pythagoras cosmology of, 150–51, 153–54, 164 Indian thought and, 154, 164 mathematics, vision of, 336–37, 340, 345 Plato, relationship with, 143 theorem, 208 travels of, 145 qi, 113, 203, 208, 329 Chinese cosmology, as basis of, 180–83 dynamism of, 181–82, 183–84 health, relation to, 181 li (principle), in relation to, 256–58 modern thought, relation to, 258–60, 271–72 in Neo-Confucian thought, 256–58, 260–62, 265, 269 Qin, Emperor, 188 Qin Jiushao, 324 quantum mechanics, 13, 258, 351–52, 353, 363–64 Quran, 246, 320, 321, 323 QWERTY keyboard, 396 Ramesses II, Pharaoh, 215 Randers, Jorgen, 429–30 reason Cartesian view of, 236–37 Chinese view of, 210, 267, 329–30 in Christian Rationalism, 342–47, 352 Christian view of, 231, 237, 338–44, 424 deification of, 158–59, 185, 190, 424–26 emotion, contrasted with, 196, 209–10, 238, 267, 362, 440–41 faith, contrasted with in Christianity, 245, 338–42, 344 in Islam, 320–24, 338 Greek view of, 148–49, 158–59, 169–71, 175, 177, 332, 336–37, 424 human uniqueness, source of, 211, 237 Indian view of, 170–72, 173, 175 Plato's view of, 155–56, 158–59, 184 Romantic view of, 196, 362 Stoic view of, 159 Taoist view of, 190–91, 210 Western view of, 16–17, 286, 440–41 reciprocal altruism, 44 reductionism, 271, 369–70 as mainstream scientific viewpoint, 357, 364, 368–70, 372–73 rejected by Romantic movement, 361–63 systems thinking, contrasted with, 14, 285, 354–55, 357–59, 365, 368–73 Reformation, 234, 245, 346–47 reincarnation in Greek thought, 153–54, 157, 164 in Indian thought, 163–64, 166, 254 religious thought agrarian culture and, 111–12 evolution of, 72–77 fear of death and, 72–73 hunter-gatherers and, 84–85, 87–88 spandrel, as a, 73–77 ren in Confucian thought, 195 in Neo-Confucian thought, 269–71 Renaissance, 251, 340, 344 Republic (Plato), 155 requerimiento, 311 reverse dominance hierarchy, 47, 463 Rhodes, Cecil, 314 Ricci, Matteo, 250, 302–303 Rig Veda (hymns), 134–36, 137, 162–63 Roman Empire, 131 Christianity in, 243–44, 300, 320, 435 decline of, 225–26, 340, 413–15, 435–36 destruction of Plato's Academy by, 159 religious tolerance of, 241, 243–44 slavery in, 299–300 Romantic movement, 196, 361–62 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques human nature, view of, 83, 91, 95, 470 Royal Society, 285–86 rta, 162, 165, 174–75 ruah, 113 Sacred Depths of Nature, The (Goodenough), 264 Sahlins, Marshall, 91 Said, Edward, 17 Saint-Simon, Henri, 388 Sanskrit, 133, 136, 137, 165, 496 Santiago theory of cognition, 14 “sapient paradox,” 69–72 Sapir, Edward, 198 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, 22, 34, 198–99, 200, 205 Whorfianism, modern, 22, 201–203, 213, 496 satcitananda, 172 Saul, King, 242–43 Schrödinger, Erwin, 366, 368 Science and Civilisation in China (Needham), 185, 257–58, 327 scientific cognition, 332–33, 335–55 Christianity and, 335, 337, 340–42 Christian Rationalism as basis of, 342–44, 349–51 Scientific Revolution and, 332–33, 343, 349–51 truth, belief in universal, 351–55 Western thought, relation to, 354–55 Scientific Revolution, 16, 235, 237, 378 causes of, 318, 330–33 magnitude of, 317–18 NATURE AS MACHINE metaphor and, 282–84 as paradigm shift, 372 scientific cognition and, 332–33, 343, 349–51 sources in Greek thought, 331 uniqueness of, 325–26, 330 scientific worldview, 237, 279, 332, 378 and Christianity, 284, 335, 347–49 Christian Rationalism and, 343 universal validity, belief in, 354–55 See also reductionism; scientific cognition Scotus, John, 341 Seattle, Chief, 288, 513 sedentism, 104–106, 475–76 “selfish gene” hypothesis, 44–45, 284–85, 371, 462 self-organization, 366–68 autopoiesis in, 368, 370 Chinese cosmology and, 185, 258–60, 263, 268, 271–72, 289 cognition and, 14 emergence and, 367–69 fractal geometry and, 263, 364–65, 370, 371 human superorganism and, 427 language and, 57–58 living organisms and, 14, 285, 368–70 machine intelligence and, 422–23 mathematics and, 353–55 qi and, 181 reciprocal causality in, 20, 23–24, 368 reductionism, contrasted with, 285, 354–55 See also complex systems; systems thinking Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de, 311 shamanism, 88–90, 472 agrarian culture and, 88, 112, 118–19 last common source of Greek and Chinese thought, 88–89, 205 monotheism and, 123 pantheism and, 441 reincarnation and, 163–64 sources in Chinese thought, 180, 472 sources in Greek thought, 146, 150 sources in Indian thought, 163–64, 173–77, 472 Upper Paleolithic art and, 89–90, 472 Shamash, 130 shared intentionality, 45, 51, 428 Shen Kuo, 251 “shifting baseline syndrome,” 414, 419–20, 429, 431, 539 Shiva, 173 Sima Guang, 251–52 Simon, Julian, 417 Singularity, 421–28 artificial intelligence causing, 422–23 dualism and, 424–26 human superorganism and, 426–28 Kurzweil's vision of, 422, 423–26, 538–39 Singularity University, 422 Sivin, Nathan, 325–26, 330, 331, 457–58 slavery, 381, 398, 403–404, 354 Smohalla, 288 social brain hypothesis, 42–45 social intelligence, 46–49, 75, 76 Socrates, 143, 155–56, 167, 169 Solomon, King, 217 Solow, Robert, 417 “Sorcerer's Apprentice” (Goethe), 375, 382, 390, 396 soul Aquinas's view of, 360 Aristotle's view of, 359–60, 368 Chinese thought, relation to, 180, 185, 209–11, 250, 265 in Christian thought, 228–29, 230, 231–33, 234, 238, 250, 360 Gnosticism and, 228 in Greek thought, 34, 153–56, 210, 337 Hellenic view of, 360 in Indian thought (atman), 163, 166–73 in Islamic thought, 246 mind, relation to, 236–37, 424 in Platonism, 223–25 Plato's view of, 154–58, 337, 359 reason, relation to, 337 as software, 425 spirit, compared with, 113, 153, 250 See also reincarnation South Africa, 436 Soviet Union, 286, 385, 399–400 Spencer, Herbert, 314 Spenser, Edmund, 234 Speyer (German town), 246 Diet of, 273 Spinoza, Baruch, 361 spirits agrarian belief in, 112–14, 123 belief in as evolutionary spandrel, 75, 76 in Chinese thought, 113, 118–19, 180–81, 192, 193, 250, 328 in Greek thought, 146, 153, 154 hunter-gatherers’ belief in, 32–33, 84–90, 94, 174 shamanic view of, 88–90, 146, 472 soul, compared with, 113, 153, 250 in Zoroastrianism, 139 Sprat, Thomas, 285–86 stenahoria, 201 stirrups, 301–302 St.

pages: 287 words: 86,919

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization
by Alexander R. Galloway
Published 1 Apr 2004

The goal of continuity is to make the Internet as intuitive as possible, to make the network a natural-feeling extension of the user’s own body. Thus, any mediation between the user and the network must be eliminated. Interfaces must be as transparent as possible. The user must be able to move through the network with unfettered ease. All traces of the medium should be hidden, hence the evolution from the less intuitive “QWERTY” keyboard to technologies such as the touch screen (e.g., Palm and other PDAs) and voice recognition software. Feedback loops. As the discussion of Brecht and Enzensberger shows, the history of media has been the history of the prohibition of many-to-many communication. Many-to-many communication is a structure of communication where each receiver of information is also potentially a sender of information.

pages: 220 words: 88,994

1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in Its Downfall
by Peter Millar
Published 1 Oct 2009

Instead of a portable typewriter – which were never that portable – or scribbled longhand notes that had then to be read to copytakers back in London, which could lead to the sort of error that once saw the Warsaw Pact become the Walsall Pact – there was the Tandy 200. A clunky but functional ‘portable computer’ that was effectively little more than an electronic typewriter with an LCD black-on-green display, the Tandy was the journalist’s lifesaver. It had a full-sized QWERTY keyboard and was powered by four AA batteries, the sort you could buy just about anywhere in the world, even behind the Iron Curtain. There was also the benefit of being able to send your copy directly into the newspaper’s own computer systems. The miracle of written words transformed into electronic signals and transmitted over the ether is so common now that it seems antique to remember that just twenty years ago, the most successful way to do it was to affix two ‘crocodile clips’ from the Tandy’s output directly to telephone wires.

pages: 304 words: 80,143

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines
by William Davidow and Michael Malone
Published 18 Feb 2020

Gary Small, a psychiatrist at UCLA, has found that self-described Internet addicts feel a pleasurable mood burst or “rush” just from booting up their computers. The Internet and cellular communications are ideal vehicles for operant conditioning. SMS (Short Messaging Service) arrived on the scene in 1984.6 But using phone keyboards to type messages was an arduous task. When the Blackberry with its tiny QWERTY keyboard arrived in 1999, the messaging floodgates opened.7 Within a few years, people were continually checking their phones for good news and alerts. The last barrier was breached with the arrival of ubiquitous touch pad smartphones. Operant conditioning environments are everywhere in virtual space.

pages: 338 words: 85,566

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Published 4 Apr 2022

As Elinor Ostrom observed, “The institutional analyst faces a major challenge in identifying the appropriate level of analysis relevant to addressing a particular puzzle.”37 This warning suggests that we should be open to the possibility that when the mode of production in the economy changes, its institutional needs do too. The Quebec Innu and lighthouses are cases in point. Inertia Institutions also exhibit inertia. They can persist past their sell-by date, compromising economic performance. The classic example is the QWERTY keyboard layout, which was originally devised to keep frequently used keys apart so as to reduce jamming in mechanical typewriters. Some expertspoint out that you can type faster on different keyboard layouts.38 So, if we ditched QWERTY, we would be able to type faster and a common activity would become marginally faster and easier.

pages: 295 words: 89,280

The Narcissist Next Door
by Jeffrey Kluger
Published 25 Aug 2014

The same listen-to-no-one folly led to the 1985 disaster that was New Coke—a universally rejected replacement for old Coke that precisely no consumers had been asking for—and the serial messes that are Microsoft Word, the all-but-universal word processing program that becomes more confusing, less intuitive and more stuffed with dubious functions with each unnecessary upgrade. Like the QWERTY keyboard, it is a bad system that unfortunately became the dominant system, but at least QWERTY has remained the same since its introduction in 1873. Microsoft Word doubles down on bad every few years. There are “I Hate Microsoft Word” forums and “I Hate Microsoft Word” rant threads. There is an “I Hate Microsoft Word” Facebook page.

The End of Accounting and the Path Forward for Investors and Managers (Wiley Finance)
by Feng Gu
Published 26 Jun 2016

The consequence of this disclosure ossification, as we will demonstrate empirically in the following chapters, is the inevitably fast and continuous deterioration in the usefulness of financial information to investors. A DEVIL’S ADVOCATE Perhaps, you may say, this is inevitable. Corporate financial reporting reached its technological apogee 110 years ago, as did double-entry bookkeeping 550 years ago, and cannot be further improved, like the QWERTY keyboard layout introduced in 1878 in the Remington No. 2 typewriter and still on keyboards today. Absurd as this sounds, it would have made some sense if suggestions for accounting change were seriously tried and found to fail. But there wasn’t any serious trial and error in accounting structure over the past century.

pages: 487 words: 95,085

JPod
by Douglas Coupland
Published 30 Apr 2007

Are you up to that challenge? Let me help you become the Power Clown you know you can be. John Doe . . . Just before the turtle meeting, I went on eBay and bought a Benelux keyboard. Belgian keyboards are totally from hell. For whatever reason, they scramble the character keys even more randomly than a QWERTY keyboard. Thanks to UPS, it ought to be here the day after tomorrow, and Kaitlin shall meet her match. God, I love the twenty-first century. I just heard her on the phone with someone in HR, trying to get out of jPod. Good luck. "What do you mean it's not possible?" [HR staffer] "Do you mean not possible now, or not possible ever}" [HR staffer] "I'm a super-experienced character animator, and I've worked at two other big companies, and none of them would ever have stuck me in this chunk of Siberia with a clump of whacked-out freaks."

pages: 111 words: 1

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Published 1 Jan 2001

For our typewriters have the order of the letters on their keyboard arranged in a nonoptimal manner, as a matter of fact in such a nonoptimal manner as to slow down the typing rather than make the job easy, in order to avoid jamming the ribbons as they were designed for less electronic days. Therefore, as we started building better typewriters and computerized word processors, several attempts were made to rationalize the computer keyboard, to no avail. People were trained on a QWERTY keyboard and their habits were too sticky for change. Just like the helical propulsion of an actor into stardom, people patronize what other people like to do. Forcing rational dynamics on the process would be superfluous, nay, impossible. This is called a path dependent outcome, and has thwarted many mathematical attempts at modeling behavior.

pages: 327 words: 102,322

Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry
by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff
Published 6 Apr 2015

Unbeknown to the students, he was talking in part about his own company. To Balsillie, RIM was in an existential crisis, mired in what he describes as “strategic confusion.” The company’s business had been disrupted on several levels, with no obvious path forward. Was RIM supposed to defend the QWERTY keyboard, or jump all-in and become a touch-screen smartphone maker? Was it supposed to challenge Apple at the high end of the smartphone market or focus on the lower end with devices like its Curve and Gemini models, which were driving heady sales gains in foreign markets where Apple wasn’t yet a factor?

pages: 370 words: 102,823

Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth
by Michael Jacobs and Mariana Mazzucato
Published 31 Jul 2016

The downside to the propensity for knowledge to build upon knowledge is that it makes a radical shift in the course of technology and infrastructure much harder to achieve. Innovation is path-dependent: it is constrained by what has gone on before. Ideas and practices are sticky. Examples abound. It is generally believed that the ostensibly odd design of the QWERTY keyboard was to prevent Englishlanguage typewriters from jamming. Very few typewriters are still in use, but the world is stuck with the keyboard, irrespective of whether it now enhances writing productivity. London’s city plan, including the shape and location of its new skyscrapers, is in part determined by Roman planning two millennia ago.

Reaper Force: The Inside Story of Britain’s Drone Wars
by Dr Peter Lee
Published 14 Jul 2019

Gav’s hands were a blur as he responded to the instructions. At the same time, he gave Dunc a quick-fire series of replies: multiple ‘confirmed’, ‘green’, ‘good’ and the occasional ‘happy’. Then all three started translating handwritten notes from the pre-flight briefing into a series of rapidly typed entries using the well-worn QWERTY keyboards in front of them. ‘Handover checks.’ Gav moved on to the next task. And so they continued. Prevailing wind conditions – over Iraq – were hastily scribbled on an old-fashioned office whiteboard on the wall next to his head. Dunc and Marty were writing up their own encoded reminders. Fuel and weapon status.

pages: 440 words: 109,150

The Secrets of Station X: How the Bletchley Park codebreakers helped win the war
by Michael Smith
Published 30 Oct 2011

In 1927, Commander Edward Travis, a member of GC&CS who oversaw the construction and security of British codes and cyphers, asked Hugh Foss, a specialist in machine cyphers, to test the commercially available machine. The Enigma machine resembled a small typewriter encased in a wooden box. It had a typewriter-style keyboard, set out in the continental QWERTZU manner, which differed slightly from the standard British/American QWERTY keyboard. Above the keyboard, on top of the box, was a lampboard with a series of lights, one for each letter of the alphabet. The operator typed each letter of the plain-text message into the machine. The action of depressing the key sent an electrical current through the machine, which lit up the encyphered letter on the lampboard.

pages: 401 words: 108,855

Cultureshock Paris
by Cultureshock Staff
Published 6 Oct 2010

Surcouf; 139 avenue Daumesnil, 75012; tel: 08.92.70.06.00; website: http://www.surcouf.com. Multi-storey bazaar selling computer hardware, software (some in English), peripherals, etc. Also offers technical support and repair. Anglo Computers; tel: 08.11.00.72.39; website: http:// www.anglocomputers.com. English-language software and qwerty keyboards are hard to find in France. If these are important to you, contact Anglo Computers, which offers everything that an Anglophone could want. Technical Support Power outages are rare, but to suppress the occasional power surges, buy a parasurtenseur (surge protector) at computer shops and hardware stores.  Micro King; 33 rue Dautancourt, 75017; tel: 01.53.06.65.10; website: http://www.micro-king.com.

pages: 376 words: 109,092

Paper Promises
by Philip Coggan
Published 1 Dec 2011

This was an age-old problem which created the need for specialists who could distinguish between the different currency units. These were the ‘money changers’ that Jesus threw out of the temple. Another historic term, ‘touchstone’, derives from a method of assessing a coin’s metallic value. Just as the QWERTY keyboard outlasted the manual typewriter, initial choices of names and weights have had long-lasting consequences. Pepin the Short, the father of Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor, lived from c.715 to 768. He established that a livre or pound of silver was worth 240 denarii or pennies, while the solidus was worth 12 denarii.15 This was the basis for the British monetary system for centuries until 1971.

pages: 394 words: 108,215

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry
by John Markoff
Published 1 Jan 2005

The small keyboard, which looked a bit like a short piano without sharps and flats, could be used either for entering text or for sending commands to the system, making it possible to edit rapidly with two hands without being forced to move a hand between the keyboard and mouse. For those who had been trained to use a standard qwerty keyboard, the Augment system took a while to get used to, and Engelbart glued one of the five-key keyboards to the dashboard of his car so he could practice using it while driving. The Augment researchers tested the system and found that it was easy for the programmers to master and that it enabled blindingly fast and efficient editing.

pages: 489 words: 106,008

Risk: A User's Guide
by Stanley McChrystal and Anna Butrico
Published 4 Oct 2021

Started as a paper mill in 1865, Nokia adapted into a telecom business in the 1990s. The Nokia 9110 Communicator is a cell phone dinosaur, but at the time, it was one of the hottest items. When the phone was closed, it was your typical dialing phone, but when opened, it had a computer screen and a full QWERTY keyboard—and access to the internet. The device was a revolutionary and intriguing technological feat. Throughout the 1990s, Nokia climbed the ladder to become one of the world’s premier telecom businesses and notably the top manufacturer of mobile phones in the latter half of the decade—a position the company would hold for more than ten years.

pages: 442 words: 110,704

The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars
by Dava Sobel
Published 6 Dec 2016

“The Draper Classification seems to me all the better because the letters are not in alphabetical order,” Russell declared. “This helps to keep the novice from thinking that it is based on some theory of evolution.” Apparently the alphabet could flout its own order and still remain effective—or even improve its utility—as a labeling scheme. Pickering could see that much on his typewriter’s QWERTY keyboard. The third of the questionnaire’s five questions contained three parts: “Do you think it would be wise for this committee to recommend at this time or in the near future any system of classification for universal adoption? If not, what additional observations or other work do you deem necessary before such recommendations should be made?

pages: 401 words: 109,892

The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets
by Thomas Philippon
Published 29 Oct 2019

As an economist, I would now say that I was “price-elastic.” Figuring out what to do with the scholarship was easy enough. The first thing I needed was a laptop. The second was an internet connection. The third was a place to sleep (priorities!), preferably not in the graduate computer lab because I don’t enjoy waking up with a QWERTY keyboard imprinted on my forehead. I had already agreed to share an apartment with two classmates, so that took care of the detail of putting a roof over my head. I could thus focus on the serious business of studying, buying books, and purchasing a computer. The US was a great place to get a laptop.

pages: 405 words: 105,395

Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator
by Keith Houston
Published 22 Aug 2023

At least, not in the conventional sense. The Nokia Communicator of 1998, emblematic of early smartphones. The clamshell case closed to reveal a numeric keypad and a small display to mimic a more standard cellphone—though ironically, the Communicator’s calculator application was accessed via the main screen and QWERTY keyboard.6 “Mobiltelefon, Dummy.” Stockholm: Tekniska Museet, 1998. https://digitaltmuseum.se/021026359221/handdator. CC BY image courtesy of Nord, Truls / Tekniska Museet. First, there are the zombies. Rummage around for long enough in any office, home, shop, or restaurant, and you are more than likely to turn up a calculator or two.

pages: 402 words: 110,972

Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets
by David J. Leinweber
Published 31 Dec 2008

Linus Torvalds’s greater skills in nerd-to-nerd diplomacy got there with Linux. 12. Quotron is another example of the “don’t build special purpose computers” rule. They did, and went from being synonymous with “electronic market data terminal” to being nowhere in a remarkably short time. The first Quotrons were so alien to Wall Street types that they rearranged the “QWERTY” keyboard to be “ABCDE.” Schumpeter was right about capitalism being a process of creative destruction. 13. Large is a relative term here. The bleeding-edge machines of the mid-1980s had 32M of memory. Fifteen years earlier, the onboard computers used on the lunar landings had 64K. 14. Evan’s fine account of his career is in Alan Rubenfeld’s book, The Super Traders: Secrets and Successes of Wall Street’s Best and Brightest (McGraw-Hill, 1995), pp. 227–252. 15.

pages: 457 words: 125,329

Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The
by Mariana Mazzucato
Published 25 Apr 2018

The internal combustion engine has retained its dominance for over a hundred years, not because it is the best possible engine, but because through historical accident it gained an initial advantage. Subsequent innovations did not seek to supplant it, but clustered around improvements to it, so that it became post factum the best engine.60 The same goes for the QWERTY keyboard layout, named for the first six letters on the top from left to right. In the days of mechanical typewriters, the very inefficiency of this keyboard layout gave it an advantage over alternatives such as the faster DVORAK layout because the mechanical keys would jam less frequently. The mechanical necessity for the QWERTY layout has long passed in these days of electronic keyboards, but its advantage has remained.

pages: 420 words: 124,202

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention
by William Rosen
Published 31 May 2010

Setting the distance between the smooth tracks on which the Blucher traveled at four feet eight and a half inches was arbitrary—that was the width of the Killingworth Colliery wagonway—but its specific width was irrelevant. The value of any standard is not its intrinsic superiority, but the number of people using it. Like the famous example of the QWERTY keyboard, the Stephenson gauge became the world standard, and it is still the width used on more than 60 percent of the world’s railroads. Of course, simply laying rails a particular distance apart does not make for a monopoly unless others follow. And others weren’t about to follow Stephenson’s lead until they were persuaded that there was some advantage to it, in the form of either increased revenue or lower costs.

pages: 382 words: 120,064

Bank 3.0: Why Banking Is No Longer Somewhere You Go but Something You Do
by Brett King
Published 26 Dec 2012

Apple is reportedly releasing a haptic-feedback, multitouch “mighty mouse” as a replacement for its current Mac mouse series.14 The one perceived shortcoming on the iPhone is the poor comparative usability of the on-screen keyboard, which has an unusually high error rate compared with its RIM competitor or a standard QWERTY keyboard. While Siri is an effort to reduce reliance on an on-screen keyboard, haptics may work as a mechanism to resolve the usability issues of an on-screen keyboard. If we feel like we are using a real keyboard as a result of haptic feedback, then the theory goes that the keyboard (and the user) will behave as if it is “real”, and accuracy will be improved dramatically.

pages: 504 words: 126,835

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard
by Fredrik Erixon and Bjorn Weigel
Published 3 Oct 2016

That arrogance seemed daring, even at that time. RiM had grown from a small Canadian pager company to a major, multi-billion-dollar mobile company in just a few years. It had made its fortune by mobilizing computer services, enabling people to read and write emails from anywhere in the world using a QWERTY keyboard. It could not have been a distant thought that there would be demand for a new mobile device that allowed people to surf the web everywhere too. And it wasn’t a distant thought. RiM understood that change was coming. But the profits it made from its own blockbuster email device were still too substantial and tempted them to stick just a little bit longer with the old, instead of moving to a new product that had a different keyboard and a screen suitable for web services.

User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work & Play
by Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant
Published 7 Nov 2019

S., 84–85, 87, 95; “Machines Cannot Fight Alone,” 78–79 stores, 150–51; Selfridge, 150, 333 Story, Joseph, 129 streamlining, 70 Stumpf, Bill, 341 subway system, 311 suit to augment muscles of the elderly, 107–108, 340 Sullivan, Louis, 371n17 Swartz, Jan, 230, 239 symbols, 85 Systrom, Kevin, 259 Taming Hal (Degani), 105 tank cockpit chairs, 87–88 Tariyal, Ridhi, 183–84 task bars, 354n7 tax preparation, 325–26 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 63–64, 333 Teague, Walter Dorwin, 58, 87, 88, 117, 164, 172, 174, 332; Polaroid camera, 117, 336 telephone, 199, 200, 205; Dreyfuss’s designs for, 91, 93, 337; icon for, 91; Princess, 337, 371n21; see also smartphones television, 230, 243, 257, 292, 321, 351n33; TiVo and, 163, 342 Tencent, 364n19 Tesla, 102, 103, 114, 119–22, 346 Tesler, Larry, 142, 144, 146 theater in Sioux City, Iowa, 55–56, 92, 173–74, 335 theme parks, 229, 254; Disneyland, 220, 336; Disney World, see Disney World thermostats, 92, 93, 336, 343, 344–45 think-aloud, 321 Thompson, Hunter S., 168 Thoughtless Acts (Fulton Suri), 179, 297 Three Mile Island (TMI), 38–43, 351n31; accident at, 15–21, 26–32, 37, 38, 40, 42, 43, 46, 78, 83, 95, 103, 105, 338–39; control panels at, 28–31, 40–43, 105; feedback and, 28, 32, 40, 42; Norman and, 24–25, 30, 38, 338–39; PORV (pilot-operated release valve) light at, 28, 29; simulated control room at, 39–40; worker pairs at, 41–42 Tibbets, Linden, 297–98 Tilley, Alvin, 88–89, 92, 337 “time is money” metaphor, 133–34, 135 Tinder, 256 TiVo, 163, 342 toothbrushes, 163 Toperator washing machine, 69, 87, 335 touchscreens, 41, 104, 127, 145–47, 343 Toyota, 135 traffic signs, 85 Trion-Z, 217 Trump, Donald, 250, 262, 264–67 trust, 107, 119; in digital assistants, 193–94, 208; self-driving cars and, 114; social mores and, 108, 112, 114; and suit to augment muscles of the elderly, 107–108 Turri, Pellegrino, 199, 205 Tversky, Amos, 96 Twitter, 134, 255, 261, 318 2001: A Space Odyssey, Hal 9000 in, 105, 117 typewriters, 64, 199, 200, 203, 205; QWERTY keyboard for, 332 Uber, 121, 259–60, 287, 355n26 UC San Diego, 23–24 U.K. government, 345, 369n2 understanding, 113, 299; in design, 42, 56, 68, 80, 289; incomplete, 271 UNICEF, 315, 369n2 United Nations, 263, 369n2 United States, 59–63, 93 University of Texas, 244 usability research, 171 user-centered design process, steps in, 305–28; building on existing behavior, 314–17; climbing the ladder of metaphors, 317–19; exposing the inner logic, 319–22; extending the reach, 322–25; form follows emotion, 325–27; making the invisible visible, 311–13; moment of truth, 327–28; starting with the user, 306–308; walking in the user’s shoes, 308–10 “user experience,” first use of term, 22, 338 user-friendly design, 3–11, 87, 95, 96, 163, 180, 245, 257, 261, 264, 269, 273–74, 288, 301–302; Apple advertisements and, 8; behavioral economics and, 96; definition of, 3; Dreyfuss and, 71; future of, 196, 297; milestones in, 331–47; paradox of, 272, 273; practitioner’s perspective on, 302–30; use of term, 4, 7, 9–10, 338; user in, 207, 242; user’s entire journey in, 323, 324 user personas, 178, 207, 261, 341 vacation industry, 238; see also cruise ships; theme parks vacuum cleaners, 157, 158, 172, 173, 286, 339, 370n16 VCRs, 26, 177, 230, 257 Velez, Pete, 19–21, 351n31 Venus Snap, 155 Viemeister, Tucker, 305 Visual Basic, 361n22 Vitruvian Man, 89 Volkswagen, 157, 355n5; self-driving cars, 103–104, 113–14, 117 Volvo, 101 von Hippel, Eric, 184 Wable, Akhil, 248, 249 Walkman, 242, 342 washing machine, 69, 87, 335 watches, 46 Watson, Dave, 137 Watson, John, 81 WeChat, 192 Wedgwood, Josiah, 90 Weiser, Mark, 233, 296, 369n11; “The Coming of Age of Calm Technology,” 341 Weizenbaum, Joseph, 337–38 West, Harry, 286–87 What the Dormouse Said (Markoff), 189 Whyte, William, 167 Wiener, Norbert, 32–33, 36, 42, 336, 369n5 Wizard of Oz technique, 193, 312 women, 63–64 Word, Clippy assistant in, 112 work-arounds, 316 workforce, 44–45 World Bank, 284 World War I, 60–61, 77, 81, 86 World War II, 6, 25, 32, 43, 72, 75, 77, 80, 81, 84–86, 88, 188, 190, 261; airplane crashes in, 77, 81–85, 102–103, 106, 121, 257; B-17 Flying Fortress in, 83–84, 335–36; lost pilots in, 75–78, 86, 87; radar in, 32, 76–79, 83, 87; radio in, 76, 77, 79, 84–85 World Wide Web, 131, 132, 147 Wozniak, Steve, 270 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 371n17 Wu, Tim, 242, 273 Xbox, 197, 205–206 Xerox, 178; Apple and, 8, 139–44, 146 Xerox PARC, 8, 127, 146; Smalltalk system at, 140–44 Yerkes, Robert Mearns, 81 YouTube, 243 Zald, David, 254 Zeigarnik, Bluma Wulfovna, 323 Zuckerberg, Mark, 131, 248, 249, 267–68, 344 THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING Find us online and join the conversation Follow us on Twitter twitter.com/penguinukbooks Like us on Facebook facebook.com/penguinbooks Share the love on Instagram instagram.com/penguinukbooks Watch our authors on YouTube youtube.com/penguinbooks Pin Penguin books to your Pinterest pinterest.com/penguinukbooks Listen to audiobook clips at soundcloud.com/penguin-books Find out more about the author and discover your next read at penguin.co.uk This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law.

pages: 411 words: 119,022

Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making
by Tony Fadell
Published 2 May 2022

And the BlackBerry die-hards would always tell you that the very best thing about their very favorite gadget was obvious. It was the keyboard. Fig. 3.4.1 Behold, the Blackberry—lovingly known as the Crackberry to its disciples. This is the Blackberry 7290, released in 2004. It had web browsing and email, a backlit QWERTY keyboard, and a black-and-white display that could show a whopping fifteen lines of text. Dwight Eschliman It was built like a tank. It took a couple of weeks to get used to, but after that you could text and email incredibly fast. It felt good under your thumbs. Solid. So when Steve told the team his vision for Apple’s first phone—one giant touchscreen, no hardware keyboard—there was an almost audible gasp.

pages: 533 words: 125,495

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters
by Steven Pinker
Published 14 Oct 2021

Many of our conventions and standards are solutions to coordination games, with nothing to recommend them other than that everyone has settled on the same ones.8 Driving on the right, taking Sundays off work, accepting paper currency, adopting technological standards (110 volts, Microsoft Word, the QWERTY keyboard) are equilibria in coordination games. There may be higher payoffs with other equilibria, but we remain locked into the ones we have because we can’t get there from here. Unless everyone agrees to switch at once, the penalties for discoordination are too high. Arbitrary focal points can figure in bargaining.

pages: 431 words: 129,071

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us
by Will Storr
Published 14 Jun 2017

‘So I could get myself some material on a blank piece of paper and then I’d say, well, this is going to be more important than it looks, so I’d like to set up a “file”. So I tell the machine, “Output to a file.” And it says, “I need a name.” I’ll give it a name. I’ll say it’s “sample file”.’ The screen faded to a shot of Engelbart’s hands. He was working on a typewriter-like QWERTY keyboard that was connected by wires to the monitor on which the words had been appearing and disappearing. To his right was a strange box containing wheels that he used to move the cursor. He called this contraption a ‘mouse’. When it was all over, the crowd rose to their feet and cheered, spellbound, enthralled.

pages: 416 words: 129,308

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone
by Brian Merchant
Published 19 Jun 2017

They stuck with the suboptimal key configuration for the same reason it had migrated to computers half a decade ago—familiarity. “When people pick up this phone in the store, it has to be something that’s instantly recognizable, that they can use immediately. And that’s why we stuck with the QWERTY keyboard, and we added a whole bunch of smarts in there.” Those smarts would be crucial. “People thought that the keyboard we delivered wasn’t sophisticated, but in reality it was super-sophisticated,” Williamson says. “Because the touch region of each key was smaller than the minimum hit size. We had to write a bunch of predictive algorithms technology to think about the words you could possibly be typing, artificially increase the hit area of the next few keys that would correspond to those words.”

How I Became a Quant: Insights From 25 of Wall Street's Elite
by Richard R. Lindsey and Barry Schachter
Published 30 Jun 2007

Quotron is another example of the “don’t build special-purpose computers” rule. It did, and went from being synonymous with “electronic market data terminal” to being nowhere in a remarkably JWPR007-Lindsey May 18, 2007 11:41 Notes 341 short time. The first Quotrons were so alien to Wall Street types that they rearranged the “QWERTY” keyboard to be ABCDE. Schumpeter was right about capitalism being a process of creative destruction. 7. Large is a relative term here. The bleeding-edge machines of the mid-1980s had 32MB of memory. Fifteen years earlier, the on-board computers used on the lunar landings had 64K. Today, you can get a 1GB memory card for about forty bucks. 8.

pages: 459 words: 138,689

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives
by Danny Dorling and Kirsten McClure
Published 18 May 2020

We may well be tuned, long term, to cope well in a world in which less and less changes. We could be well adapted for the stability that is already upon us. However, before we accept that things are no longer speeding up, many of us may clutch at every future small technological discovery as a great advancement. One day I hope I will not have to type words on a QWERTY keyboard, but that day should already have come. That keyboard was designed for slowdown—to actually slow down typists’ speed so that the levers of old typewriters did not jam. A few friends of my age whose hands have also been worn out by too much typing now use voice recognition to dictate their ideas, rather like how businesspeople used to dictate to their secretaries.

pages: 506 words: 133,134

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future
by Noreena Hertz
Published 13 May 2020

It’s a strategy that has seen considerable success when it comes to helping smokers put an end to their addiction.104 You might even want to consider junking your smartphones and instead buying a Lightphone, an intentionally ‘low-tech’ device that features calling and (gasp!) T9 texting, the most basic of the basic forms of texting – without even the ease of a qwerty keyboard – and that stores only ten contacts at a time.105 Yet this is not a battle we can fight on our own. To curb our digital addiction at a significant scale, decisive government intervention is essential. Think of the measures governments use to discourage the use of tobacco, such as mandating that warnings be printed on all packaging.

pages: 339 words: 57,031

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
by Fred Turner
Published 31 Aug 2006

Over the next decade, he and his staffers at the Augmentation Research Center invented some of the most ubiquitous features of contemporary computers, including the mouse. Between 1966 and 1968, the group developed a collaborative office computing environment known as the On-Line System, or NLS. The NLS featured many of the elements common to computer systems today, including not only the mouse, but a QWERTY keyboard and a CRT terminal. More importantly, the system offered its users the ability to work on a document simultaneously from multiple sites, to connect bits of text via hyperlinks, to jump from one point to another in a text, and to develop indexes of key words that could be searched. The NLS depended on a time-sharing computer, yet it functioned within the office environment much like a contemporary intranet.

pages: 497 words: 144,283

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization
by Parag Khanna
Published 18 Apr 2016

This new generation of maps and models is thus more than a collection of pretty digital guides. They should be the focal point for the synthesis of environmental science, politics, economics, culture, technology, and sociology3—a curriculum curated through the study of connections rather than divisions. We shouldn’t be using static political maps any more than we would cling to QWERTY keyboards when we have voice recognition, gestural interfaces, and instant video communication. Today’s “digital natives”—also known as millennials or Generation Y (and Z)—need this new tool kit. There are more young people alive today than ever in history: Forty percent of the world population is under the age of twenty-four, meaning an even larger percentage has no personal memory of colonialism or the Cold War.

Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Inside Technology)
by Geoffrey C. Bowker
Published 24 Aug 2000

New participants acquire a naturalized familiarity with its objects as they become members. • Links with conventions of practice. Infrastructure both shapes and is shaped by the conventions of a community of practice; for exa mple , the ways that cycles of day-night work are a ffected by and affect electrical power rates a nd needs. Genera tions of typists have learned the QWERTY keyboard ; its limitations are inherited by the computer keyboard and thence by the design of today's computer furniture (Becker 1 982). • Embodiment of standards. Modified by scope and often by conflicting conventions, infrastructure takes on transparency by plugging into other infrastructures and tools in a standardized fashion

pages: 532 words: 141,574

Bleeding Edge: A Novel
by Thomas Pynchon
Published 16 Sep 2013

Offer them a choice between pullin a single over on Rikers or an opportunity to take the next step toward becoming a ‘real hacker.’ Is how they put it.” “You know somebody this happened to?” “A few. Some took the deal, some split town. They enroll you in a course out in Queens where you learn Arabic and how to write Arabic Leet.” “That’s . . .” taking a guess, “using a qwerty keyboard to make characters that look like Arabic? So hashslingrz is, what, expanding into a new Mideast market area?” “One theory. Except that every day civilians walk around, no clue, even when it’s filling up screens right next to them at Starbucks, cyberspace warfare without mercy, 24/7, hacker on hacker, DOS attacks, Trojan horses, viruses, worms . . .”

France (Lonely Planet, 8th Edition)
by Nicola Williams
Published 14 Oct 2010

The train station is 800m southwest of place Stanislas. Information Copycom ( 03 83 22 90 41; 3 rue Guerrier de Dumast; per hr €2; 9am-8pm Mon-Sat, 3-8pm Sun) Internet access. E-café Cyber Café ( 03 83 35 47 34; 11 rue des Quatre Églises; per min/hr €0.09/5.40; 11am-9pm Mon & Sat, 9am-9pm Tue-Fri, 2-8pm Sun) A proper café whose computers have qwerty keyboards and webcams. Laundrette (124 rue St-Dizier; 7.45am-9.30pm) Métropolitain ( 03 83 33 14 71; 12 rue Mazagran; Nancy Gare; per hr €3; noon-2am daily) Internet access in a bar-cum-games arcade. Post Office (10 rue St-Dizier; Point Central) Does currency exchange. Tourist Office ( 03 83 35 22 41; www.ot-nancy.fr; place Stanislas; 9am-7pm Mon-Sat, 10am-5pm Sun & holidays Apr-Oct, 9am-6pm Mon-Sat, 10am-1pm Sun & holidays Nov-Mar) Inside the hôtel de ville.

EMERGENCY Duty Pharmacy ( 04 76 63 42 55) Grenoble University Hospital ( 04 76 76 75 75) Hôpital Nord La Tronche (av de Marquis du Grésivaudan; tram stop ‘La Tronche’ on tramway line B); Hôpital Sud (av de Kimberley, Echirolles; bus 11 & 13) INTERNET ACCESS Log in to the tourist office’s two computers (below) for €2 per 15 minutes or €5 an hour. Celsius Café ( 04 76 00 13 60; 15 rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau; per 30/60min €1.50/2.50; 9am-11pm Mon-Sat, 1-8pm Sun) Top location and facilities. Neptune Internet ( 04 76 63 94 18; 2 rue de la Paix; per 30/60min €2.50/3.50; 1-7pm Mon-Sat, 2-6pm Sun) A funky, tidy place with lots of QWERTY keyboards. Pl@net Internet ( 04 76 47 44 74; 1 place Vaucanson; per hr €3.50; 8.30am-10pm Mon-Sat) LAUNDRY Pay about €3.50 to wash a 7kg load: Au 43 Viallet (43 av Félix Viallet; 7am-8pm) Laverie Berriat (88 cours Berriat; 7am-8pm) POST Post Office (rue de la République) Next to the tourist office.

The old town, Le Suquet quarter, is to the west of the Vieux Port. Information BOOKSHOPS Cannes English Bookshop ( 04 93 99 40 08; 11 rue Bivouac Napoléon) Get your (English-language) summer reading from the lovely Christel and Wally. INTERNET ACCESS Cap Cyber (12 rue 24 AoÛt; per hr €3; 10am-9pm Mon-Sat) Very central, with several QWERTY keyboards and Asian language software. LAUNDRY Laverie du Port ( 04 93 38 06 68; 36 rue Georges Clemenceau; per 7kg load €5.50, drying per 10min €1.50; closed Sun & from noon Sat) Multilingual staff on-site. MONEY Scads of banks line rue d’Antibes and rue Buttura. Crédit Lyonnais (13 rue d’Antibes) Has an ATM.

pages: 678 words: 159,840

The Debian Administrator's Handbook, Debian Wheezy From Discovery to Mastery
by Raphaal Hertzog and Roland Mas
Published 24 Dec 2013

Selecting the language 4.2.3. Selecting the country The second step consists in choosing your country. Combined with the language, this information enables the program to offer the most appropriate keyboard layout. This will also influence the configuration of the time zone. In the United States, a standard QWERTY keyboard is suggested, and a choice of appropriate time zones is offered. Figure 4.3. Selecting the country 4.2.4. Selecting the keyboard layout The proposed “American English” keyboard corresponds to the usual QWERTY layout. Figure 4.4. Choice of keyboard 4.2.5. Detecting Hardware This step is completely automatic in the vast majority of cases.

pages: 741 words: 164,057

Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing
by Kevin Davies
Published 5 Oct 2020

“In theory,” Chandra wrote, “one can design a zinc finger for each of the sixty-four possible triplet codons, and, using a combination of these fingers, one could design a protein for sequence-specific recognition of any segment of DNA.” These zinc-finger nucleases (ZFNs) could be programmed to latch onto any DNA sequence that would serve all manner of applications. Interestingly, Chandra’s choice has stood the test of time. “Like the fact that a [soccer] match lasts ninety minutes or the QWERTY keyboard starts with the letter Q, it is widely accepted,” says Urnov. “People haven’t seen the need to evolve beyond that.” Chandra was in no doubt that his chimeric nucleases—“a new type of molecular scissors”—could transform gene therapy: in 1999 he said his goal was to excise a gene mutation and replace it neatly with its normal counterpart.

pages: 547 words: 173,909

Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World
by Nick Bostrom
Published 26 Mar 2024

You know, like the TCP/IP standards upon which the internet runs, or the DNA code, or the Roman alphabet. Lock-in effects can make such protocols extremely durable. It might be tricky even for an advanced civilization to coordinate its way out of the local optimum of a globally suboptimal standard. We remain stuck with the (allegedly) slow QWERTY keyboard layout, for example, many decades after people stopped using mechanical typewriters; and a few countries even continue to cling to the imperial system of measurement units. So my friend reckons that if he can become a new standard, he could then enjoy great longevity. Well, now we can see that this destiny might not only give him great longevity (which should hopefully be readily available to everyone in utopia) but also great practical usefulness, and hence purpose.

Energy and Civilization: A History
by Vaclav Smil
Published 11 May 2017

As long as the established sources or prime movers work well within established settings, are readily available, and are profitable, their substitutes, even those with some clearly superior attributes, will advance only slowly. Economists might see these realities as examples of lock-in or path dependence as conceptualized by David (1985), who based his argument on a takedown of the QWERTY keyboard (as opposed to a supposedly superior Dvorak layout). But we do not need any new questionable labels to describe what is a very common process of slow, evolutionary progression noticeable in organismic evolution and personal decision making, as well as in technical advances and economic management.

pages: 781 words: 226,928

Commodore: A Company on the Edge
by Brian Bagnall
Published 13 Sep 2005

When he was unable to convince Charpentier to develop a handheld LCD computer, he departed for Japan to see if he could bypass his reluctant engineers and obtain the product he desired. Tramiel returned with a Toshiba IHC-8000. The tiny computer looked like a calculator, with a single row of 24 characters on the LCD and a tiny rubber QWERTY keyboard. He rebranded it the HHC-4 (Handheld Computer), and replaced the Toshiba decal with a Commodore logo in order to display the product at the upcoming CES. In the past, Tramiel reacted to the market, often making decisions based on what his competitors sold. In 1982, the Osborne 1 portable microcomputer was selling well, and with it, the Osborne Computer Corporation began remarkable growth.

pages: 669 words: 210,153

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 6 Dec 2016

I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.” Might be time for you (and me) to rethink our personal priorities. On a related and sad note, Matt’s father passed away unexpectedly weeks after he recommended this article to me. Matt was at his bedside. Qwerty Is for Junior Varsity The normal QWERTY keyboard layout was designed to slow down human operators to avoid jams. That time has passed, so try the Dvorak layout instead, which is easier on your tendons and helps prevent carpal tunnel syndrome. Read The Dvorak Zine (dvzine.org). Colemak is even more efficient, if you dare. Within Automattic, Matt has held speed-typing challenges, where the loser has to switch to the winner’s layout.

pages: 496 words: 174,084

Masterminds of Programming: Conversations With the Creators of Major Programming Languages
by Federico Biancuzzi and Shane Warden
Published 21 Mar 2009

Second thing we wanted to do was to get away from the requirements that punch cards imposed on users, which was that things had to be in certain columns on the card, and so we wanted to be something more or less free form that somebody could type on a teletype keyboard, which is just a standard “qwerty” keyboard, by the way, but only with uppercase letters. That’s how the form of the language appeared, something that was easy to type, in fact originally it was space-independent. If you put spaces or you didn’t put spaces in what you were typing it didn’t make any difference, because the language was designed originally so that whatever you typed was always interpreted by the computer correctly, even if there were spaces or no spaces.

pages: 846 words: 232,630

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
by Daniel C. Dennett
Published 15 Jan 1995

The idea was to minimize the collision problem by separating those keys that followed one another frequently.... Once {123} adopted, it resulted in many millions of typewriters 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 of Mendel may look like universal laws of nature from our myopic perspective, but from a different perspective they may appear to count as merely local conditions, with historical explanations.13 If so, then a restricted concept of biological possibility is the sort we want; the ideal of a universal concept of biological possibility will be misguided.

pages: 901 words: 234,905

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
by Steven Pinker
Published 1 Jan 2002

A switch from driving on the left to driving on the right could not begin with a daring nonconformist or a grass-roots movement but would have to be imposed from the top down (which is what happened in Sweden at 5 A.M., Sunday, September 3, 1967). Other examples are laying down your weapons when hostile neighbors are armed to the teeth, abandoning the QWERTY keyboard layout, and pointing out that the emperor is not wearing any clothes. But traditional cultures can change, too, and more dramatically than most people realize. Preserving cultural diversity is considered a supreme virtue today, but the members of the diverse cultures don’t always see it that way.

pages: 1,197 words: 304,245

The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution
by David Wootton
Published 7 Dec 2015

Pinch appears to think that this is the sole cause of agreement on measurements (Labinger and Collins (eds.), The One Culture? (2001), 223) but that can’t be right, or agreement once established would never break down. xi Under particular circumstances there may be an economic or institutional investment in a bad solution that allows it to persist. The English-language QWERTY keyboard is an example (David, ‘Clio and the Economics of QWERTY’ (1985)); geocentrism, for the Catholic Church after 1616, is also an example. xii The issue arose, entirely predictably, shortly after the invention of the pendulum clock (1656), which made possible new standards of accuracy, exposing previously invisible anomalies (Cohen, ‘Roemer and the First Determination of the Velocity of Light (1676)’ (1940), 338).

pages: 1,351 words: 385,579

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
by Steven Pinker
Published 24 Sep 2012

A famous example is the way an early technological standard can gain a toehold among a critical mass of users, who use it because so many other people are using it, and thereby lock out superior competitors. According to some theories, these “network externalities” explain the success of English spelling, the QWERTY keyboard, VHS videocassettes, and Microsoft software (though there are doubters in each case). Another example is the unpredictable fortunes of bestsellers, fashions, top-forty singles, and Hollywood blockbusters. The mathematician Duncan Watts set up two versions of a Web site in which users could download garage-band rock music. 273 In one version users could not see how many times a song had already been downloaded.

pages: 889 words: 433,897

The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey
by Emmanuel Goldstein
Published 28 Jul 2008

LCD is okay, supertwist LCD even better, EL and PLASMA are even better than that, but if you plan to hack at night or in the dark like most hackers on the road, you should make sure your laptop has a backlit screen. Color LCD screens are useless unless you plan to call Prodigy or download and view GIFs, in which case you should stop reading this article right now and go back to play with your Nintendo. The keyboard should be a standard full-sized QWERTY keyboard, with full travel plastic keys. You don’t need a numeric keypad or function keys or any of that crap. Membrane keyboards or chicklet rubber keys are out of the question. Unless you are utterly retarded, having your keys alphabetized is not an added benefit. Basically, if you can touch type on a keyboard without your fingers missing keys, getting jammed, or slipping around, then it is a good keyboard.