[samatman]

The legend of QWERTY being designed specifically to slow typists down will never die. It has that perfect "folk" quality, it should be true, the problem is simply that there isn't any evidence for it.

What does stick out about QWERTY, is that you can type the word "typewriter" using only the top keys, a trick that made it easier for typewriter salesmen to memorize and demonstrate that little trick when selling their wares. And we do have evidence that this motivated the layout.

[garaetjjte]

In fact, QWERTY was designed to prevent jamming of early typewriters, allowing to type faster.

http://widespacer.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-hidden-secrets-of...

[cortesoft]

Even that theory has been questioned:

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

It seems likely the keyboard layout was the result of working with typists to develop the best layout.

[garaetjjte]

Linked paper [0] correctly states that QWERTY wasn't designed to slow typists down, but authors argue that it was not designed to avoid type-bar jams, but only vaguely suggest some letters were moved around due to Morse operation practice. They base that conclusion on analysis of radial distances of common digrams on typebar basket. But there's no justification why only angle criteria was considered, and they omitted that layout clearly minimizes adjacent typebar digrams, which is shown by [1] and [2].

They also without much evidence reject idea that TYPEWRITER ending up on same row was intentional design, but curiously enough [2] calculated odds of that occurring randomly as about 1 in 2500, so it might have been.

[0] https://repository.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2433...

[1] http://widespacer.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-hidden-secrets-of...

[2] https://cyber.sci-hub.se/MTAuMTAxNi9qLnJlc3BvbC4yMDEzLjAzLjA...

[taeric]

This is a patato patahto thing. It would only jam if you went too fast, so the story goes. Get rid of the jamming, or force a max speed that is lower.

[samatman]

It's actually a critical distinction.

If QWERTY was designed to be the worst possible layout, to make typing slow in order to prevent jams, then now, with n-key rollover, we're all stuck with the worst possible layout.

If instead it was designed to be the most jam-free possible layout, with a secondary goal of being as fast as possible given that criterion, it's probably not that bad, and we'd live in a world where the fastest QWERTY typists aren't that much slower than the fastest typists, period.

And, in fact, we see that, while the world record was at one time held by a Dvorak typist, the prize at present belongs to QWERTY:

https://www.typing.com/blog/fastest-typists/

[stevage]

I wonder if anyone has ever set out to design the worst possible layout, and if so, what it would look like.

[jeffbee]

Could be a fun game. For starters I'd move the most useless keys to the index finger home row positions, perhaps pipe and backtick. Then I'd invert the sense of shift, so you have to hold it to type anything lowercase. I'd take all the most common two-letter sequences and I'd move those letters under the weakest finger. So T H E O A R S and N replace the punctuation keys on the right side. This should make it a real hassle to type "the", especially considering that you'll be holding down shift, which should itself be somewhere hard to reach, such as where 6 usually goes.

[I_complete_me]

Can't figure out whether you are a sadist or a masochist but I love how you ran with _that_ particular ball. Kudos to you.

[benhurmarcel]

http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?worst_layout

[sarbaz]

It's worth pointing out that the worst possible layout for keyboards might actually be one of the best possible layouts for phones.

[taeric]

I am not claiming to support that it is the worst. Just saying that, if it helps you type faster by keeping the device from jamming because you are typing too fast, then it is by definition helping you type faster by limiting the speed that you can type. Hence, slowing you down so that you don't go so fast that you crash.

As per the claim of the fastest typist. I would be shocked it steno doesn't win that, hands down.

Edit: Added in "because you are typing too fast", which was part of the original claim. I should have noted I don't know if I believe it, but I did want to raise that something that makes you go as fast as you can by keeping you from going too fast, both slows you down and makes you type faster. At the same time.

[garaetjjte]

That's some tortuous logic. If it helps type faster by keeping the device from jamming, then... it helps type faster. If it only jammed because you type too fast, you could(/must) just slow down, no fancy layouts necessary. It didn't jam because you pressed any key too fast, it jammed when you pressed adjacent typebar too fast, and with proper layout (making sure that common digrams weren't on adjacent typebars) these situations could be minimized.

Weird thing in these discussions is considering that most jam-free possible layout and as fast as possible was somehow different design goal. But, in world of early mechanical typewriters, it was the same! You couldn't have "fast" layout that jammed because it wouldn't be fast, and if you had jam-free layout it probably was fast, because it weren't forcing you to depress each key completely before pressing next.

[taeric]

But only in the sense that my kid's training wheels help them go faster on a bike. Since that only works up to a certain speed.

So... yeah, it is somewhat convoluted, but not as much as you seem to be implying. Take "kids chopsticks". They speed up kids, obviously. They slow down folks that know what they are going.

(Really, I could probably list a huge list of things that all work in this vein.)

[samatman]

Stenography is specifically excluded, because it's a shorthand: the actual form of the final text is reconstituted from abbreviation.

The system described in the OP text is a form of stenography, conducted with a normal keyboard. I would be surprised if a competition typist, presented with an already-shortened text, couldn't beat out most stenotype stenographers working off the original text.

It would be unfair for a typing competition to exclude a chorded keypad, and I don't know of they do or not. It's completely fair to not accept "ts cmptly fr" as the transcription of "it's completely fair", no matter how it's typed in.

[taeric]

In the context of the article we are reading, this seems somewhat amusing. The entire trick, as presented, turns typing into an adhoc shorthand.

That all said, I confess I don't buy many of the benefits of alternative keyboards. I switched to colemak about a year ago and I think I am still below the speed I was at qwerty. Significantly so.

Of course, I don't know that this has had a major impact on my speed of getting things done. Plenty of other obstacles there.

[stevage]

Well, there's two clear things about the layout of QWERTY:

1. TYPEWRITER on the top row. 2. DFGHJKL on the middle row, in perfect alphabetical order except for the two vowels that got moved to the top. (The French version has the M after the L).

It looks very much like they started with alphabetical order, then moved a couple of things.

[gdx]

Anecdotically, QWERTY also seems to be sort of arranged in alphabetical order but with certain keys moved here and there — for exemple, the middle row is:

A .. D . F G H . J K L

(dots indicating the missing letters.)

Then it goes down for the M N from right to left, up for O P, then the top row is:

Q R . T U

And the bottom row is, from right to left:

V . X . Z

And then the rest.

[bclnr]

A while ago I did a little analysis to compare ergonomics of existing keyboard layouts [1]. The criteria are obviously subjective, but the results clearly show that Qwerty comes out significantly inferior to all alternatives designed later.

[1] https://github.com/bclnr/kb-layout-evaluation