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by Eduardo3rd 2736 days ago
Interesting example of a place where a small but meaningful advantage in a manual application (reduced eye strain during visual inspection) leads to a larger, nearly insurmountable advantage in a world where the task has been largely automated thanks to preexisting R&D/economies of scale. I expect we will see more and more of this in the coming decades across multiple industries.

Anything else fit this pattern today?
3 comments
jacwah 2736 days ago
This reminds me of "The Calf-Path": https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/calf-path
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brianwawok 2736 days ago
QWERTY keyboards? Built so mechanical typewriter keys would not hit. Used for computers.
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jsjohnst 2736 days ago
> Built so mechanical typewriter keys would not hit.

Most likely a myth. There’s tons of articles on it, but here’s one to get you started:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fact-of-fiction-...

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stan_rogers 2736 days ago
The authors of the paper seem to believe that the object would have been to slow down the typist (had the jamming hypothesis been correct). The opposite would have been true. Increase the difference of the angle of approach of successive hammers, and you decrease the chance of jamming and increase the speed. I'll admit that the Z-SE ("dot-dot-dot-space-dot" in early American Morse, with the length of the space/mark mkaing the difference) problem makes some superficial sense, but then there's a corresponding R-EI ("dot-space-dot-dot") and others that aren't reflected on the QUERTY keyboard. (The original Morse code needed far too much space-length discipline, which is why it was replaced fairly quickly, even in the NIH-heavy USA.)
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analog31 2736 days ago
GUI.

Small but meaningful advantage in a manual application:

* Guiding the user to guide a complex machine through a precise sequence of steps in order to achieve a goal, such as reading mail or writing a letter

Automation:

* Natural language recognition, shell scripting

Economy of scale:

* Beautiful formatted text has lost its value due to being ubiquitous, and more and more document processing consists of copying and pasting in an e-mail program

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