Your QWERTY keyboard won’t slow you down, but believing a myth might
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I just read Guns, Germs & Steel. It’s detailed and dry in parts, but an interesting book overall. One part about keyboard layouts blew my mind. Then I found out it’s a myth and my mind was un-blewn.
It explains how the QWERTY keyboard was designed in the late 1800s to slow down typing in order to stop keys from jamming.
Mind. Blown.
Why didn’t the competing Dvorak keyboard designed for speed take off instead? Especially once jamming was resolved?
These are good questions so I did some digging.
Conventional wisdom says the obviously superior Dvorak keyboard was doomed only by market inertia and thus we’re all using a poorly designed layout to this day.
There’s only one problem. It just isn’t true.
Modern research shows the Dvorak layout is superior in some aspects and QWERTY in others. The effect is essentially a wash.
Mind. Unblown.
The main source of the myth was Dvorak himself. He did what anyone acting on a genuine belief that their reasoning is correct would do. He stretched the truth more than a little.
This is a prime example of why fact checking is important. Especially when making important decisions.
Even smart, sincere authors get things wrong sometimes. Just because it’s in a book or on the Internet doesn’t mean it’s true.
So... Your QWERTY keyboard won’t slow you down, but believing a myth might.
Quora Explanation
Wikipedia Article