(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.”
Post was last modified on 26 Feb 2023 10:10 am
Former Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes — who resigned in January over the paper spiking a…
The newest and most powerful technologies — so-called reasoning systems from companies like OpenAI, Google and the…
It has long been assumed that William Shakespeare’s marriage to Anne Hathaway was less than…
Some 50 years ago, my father took me to his office in Washington, DC. I…