[HN Gopher] Where did the QWERTY keyboard come from?
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Where did the QWERTY keyboard come from?
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 20 points
Date : 2023-09-05 15:52 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| javier_e06 wrote:
| I learned to type on a Corona typewriter and it would jam when
| the key metal arms (or whatever the name was) came from the
| opposite side. The arm coming from the left side leaving too slow
| and bam! the arm from the right side comes smashing the other
| arm. My guess then was that the letters were put in some fashion
| that the group of letters coming from the right side seldom where
| adjacent from the group of letters coming from the left side. The
| closer the arms where to the center of the typewriter the less
| they would travel hence faster going in and out and beneficial
| for the letters to be adjacent, for the English language of
| course.
|
| ETAOIN SHRDLU
|
| The 10 most common letters in the English language. With
| exception of the A, all towards the center of keyboard.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| L is the opposite position to A, so also an edge letter.
|
| I too learnt to type in part on a mechanical typewriter
| keyboard -- there was a TV kids show about journalists and I
| wanted to mimic them I think. IME (a long time ago) you wanted
| to have consecutive keys on opposite hands because it took the
| whole hand moving to provide a good force to move the key and
| impact the ribbon hard enough to make a good print of the
| letter. But then, as you said, you would occassionally get the
| type arms locking up. I definitely couldn't use my pinky to
| type on that keyboard.
|
| TH, ER, ON, AN are the most common letter pairs [in British
| English]; TH is good on a QWERTY but the other pairs are not
| particularly well placed I think.
| fanf2 wrote:
| The Linotype keyboard has ETAOIN SHRDLU as the leftmost two
| columns of each block of letters (separate keys for lower and
| upper case!)
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Linotype_keyboard_wi...
| llm_nerd wrote:
| Tangentially related but there is a recent Radiolabs podcast
| about "The Wubi Effect" and it's a very interesting listen. The
| Chinese market also uses QWERTY (which surprised me), and they
| enter text using a variety of coding tactics. The government
| pushed method is called pinyin and is basically phonetic and was
| a way to try to standardize pronunciation. The Wubi method is
| basically building the shape components of the character set.
|
| Anyways, fascinating to learn. Somehow didn't realize that so
| much of the world also uses QWERTY.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Pinyin is not just an input method, it's also the standard way
| to write Mandarin in the Latin alphabet.
|
| Virtually all the spellings of names from mainland China that
| you're familiar with (e.g., Xi Jinping) are written in Pinyin.
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| https://radiolab.org/podcast/wubi-effect
| sho_hn wrote:
| The essential read: https://sino-
| platonic.org/complete/spp171_chinese_writing_re...
| lsmeducation wrote:
| It's interesting how we play the most advanced video games on a
| peripheral from 1870. Zero innovation on that front, and worse,
| we're going even further backward with the mechanical keyboard
| obsession.
| Phrodo_00 wrote:
| The reason we had to go backwards to mechanical keyboards is
| that modern keyboards were being built just for lower prices
| with no regard to feel or longevity.
|
| Sometimes things don't need innovation. If you don't want to
| play with a keyboard there's always controllers (that also seem
| to have found a pretty stable form the last years)
| [deleted]
| ghaff wrote:
| I have a mechanical keyboard on my main desktop system. But I
| have to admit that, given the amount of typing I do on short-
| throw (non-butterfly) MacBook keyboards, I'm not sure I
| really have a clear preference at this point.
|
| (And there's something to be said more generally for the
| keyboards you use day to day not being radically different
| from most other keyboards you'll encounter.)
| qball wrote:
| >we're going even further backward with the mechanical keyboard
| obsession
|
| Well, not quite; single-stage/two-stage trigger technology, as
| well as progressive triggers, have some benefits when applied
| to keyboards.
|
| First, single-stage/two-stage triggers give you (with single-
| stage) a single smooth press with activation point somewhere in
| the middle, or (with two-stage) a consistent amount of takeup
| then a wall that you have to break through to activate the
| mechanism. So you can have the key pressed and resting on the
| activation point, and then press it the rest of the way when
| you want the input to register (for instance, if you're in a
| game and are waiting for someone to peek around the corner).
|
| Second, progressive triggers, where pressing a little way
| registers a single input and pressing it all the way down/back
| types something fully-automatically. They're still mostly
| useless because the manufacturers refuse to put properly heavy
| springs in the switches, but the technology itself is ready for
| this.
|
| It's certainly strange that it took 70 years from the
| implementations of these ideas in firearms to today's keyboards
| given the advantages of each mechanism are equally applicable
| to both, but that's the way it happened.
| lsmeducation wrote:
| _First, single-stage /two-stage triggers give you (with
| single-stage) a single smooth press with activation point
| somewhere in the middle, or (with two-stage) a consistent
| amount of takeup then a wall that you have to break through
| to activate the mechanism. So you can have the key pressed
| and resting on the activation point, and then press it the
| rest of the way when you want the input to register (for
| instance, if you're in a game and are waiting for someone to
| peek around the corner)._
|
| This is a cool thing, I'd want that on my mouse triggers
| also. The problem is that in practice it'll never be what we
| want it to be because the distance of switches is too small
| to make that two stage thing be a thing (we'd need super
| heavy switches for this to be a thing). Now imagine mouse
| clicks which are supposed to represent a trigger (we operate
| as if everything is a hair trigger).
|
| Burst/Single burst is mostly a timing thing at this point.
| Would be interesting to see it become a force based thing.
|
| Fun ideas though.
| qball wrote:
| >Now imagine mouse clicks which are supposed to represent a
| trigger.
|
| Interestingly, some consoles already do this- the PS5 in
| particular will vary the weight of its shoulder triggers to
| match what you're doing on screen.
|
| >we'd need super heavy switches for this to be a thing
|
| It continuously surprises me that none of the Hall effect
| keyboard makers (Wooting, Drunkdeer, and... I think
| Steelseries and Corsair have some as well) don't offer
| ultra-high-weight springs as at least an option for this
| reason.
|
| Interestingly, there's another keyboard manufacturer, Roli,
| who makes a board that has some very interesting modes of
| input (as they accept inputs of variable pressure, give you
| the ability to slide smoothly between keys, and vary the
| kind of input from each key by shaking your fingers). Of
| course, that's not a computer keyboard, but it's still a
| glimpse into the kinds of interesting input devices we
| could make if only we bothered to do so.
| [deleted]
| asoneth wrote:
| > even further backward with the mechanical keyboard obsession
|
| My impression has been that, along with 3D printing, the
| mechanical keyboard obsession has has spurred a renaissance of
| keyboard innovation in the last decade or so.
|
| You can now buy keyboards or kits with ortholinear/columnar
| keys, split hands, built-in displays, modes/layers, non-QWERTY
| layouts, Hall effect keys, non-uniform resistance, and more.
|
| I haven't seen this degree of keyboard innovation in a long
| time. The best part is that they're an order of magnitude
| cheaper than the wacky keyboards of the 1980s and 1990s, many
| of which cost thousands of dollars. These days you can try
| something innovative out for just a few hundred bucks and even
| less if you're willing to solder it yourself.
| navels wrote:
| What a useless article, especially given the title. Here's all
| they have to say about the layout:
|
| _There's some dispute over how and why Sholes and Glidden
| arrived at the QWERTY layout. Some historians have argued that it
| solved a jamming problem by spacing out the most common letters
| in English; others, particularly more recent historians, hold
| that it was designed specifically to help telegraphists avoid
| common errors when transcribing Morse code. Regardless, after
| around 30 test models, Sholes and Glidden settled on QWERTY--and
| changed the world._
| happytoexplain wrote:
| I disagree. When I have a question, I am prepared for the
| answer to have some amount of ambiguity, especially when it
| comes to historical questions of the format "why is X", "how
| did X originate", etc. If I were trying to choose a descriptive
| name for an article, the question that it researches is a
| reasonable choice. Combined then, I am happy with the article's
| content given its title, and I am happy with the information it
| delivered to me without my having to do my own research. I
| don't feel that this is clickbait, nor do I feel qualified to
| assert that their conclusion is wrong.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yes, and like many I've heard the anti-jamming explanation
| (contra the slow typists down one), so I actually find it
| interesting that this is a somewhat unsettled question.
| TheBlight wrote:
| Came for the why but at least got the where as advertised.
| yboris wrote:
| One fun theory is that layout purposefully included letters for
| the word "Typewriter" in the top row (even when fingers are on
| the home row). This made it an easy selling point: "see how easy
| it is to type the name of the object?"
| AprilArcus wrote:
| Yes! And the home row is mostly in disemvoweled alphabetical
| order: "d_fgh_jkl", another hint at the layout's origins.
| eimrine wrote:
| The qwerty came from idiots.
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