The QWERTY Myth…

(The Economist) “…goes roughly as follows. The QWERTY design (patented by Christopher Sholes in 1868 and sold to Remington in 1873) aimed to solve a mechanical problem of early typewriters. When certain combinations of keys were struck quickly, the type bars often jammed.” But the real problem is that “economists seem to adopt bogus anecdotal histories and then get locked in.” 

• A drier, more academic version: “The Fable of the Keys.”
• A rebuttal, from The Dvorak Keyboard: “[P]ro-QWERTY articles are written by people that don’t care about typing efficiency, but rather want to make an academic point by shooting down the Dvorak keyboard.”

—The QWERTY Myth…