Qwerty keyboards..

[anywebsite]

I'd have a huge issue if somebody gave me a blank qwerty keyboard and asked me to put the letters in the right place.

 

But I just touch typed that. Weird isn't it? I heard it's down to muscle memory.

 

In fact, I just tried to imagine where the letter... 'J' for example is, on the keyboard, and I couldn't. But when I put my fingers down to write jam, I could.

 

Very odd.

 

It takes time to learn those muscle memories, you've probably used a qwerty keyboard for years. If you switched to a dvorak keyboard, you'd have to learn to type again, it could take months of practice to get up to your current speed & accuracy - depending on how good you are with qwerty.

 

Then if you persevere you could end up 50% faster, so it could be worth the effort, except qwerty is the standard that everybody else uses. You'd need to take your special keyboard with you anywhere you might want to type something, then hope you can mess around with the settings to make it work. You'd probably have to buy your own keyboard for work - or learn to use a keyboard that has a conflicting layout printed on it. It was even worse in typewriter days, they were much more expensive, harder to change & much less reliable than electronic keyboards. Even now you'd struggle to find a supplier for a dvorak keyboard & pay over the odds for it, otherwise you need to make your own with stickers or by rearranging the keys.

 

That's why qwerty has remained the standard, if we have two different standards in use then everybody needs to learn to type twice, for a generation until the improved standard takes over, so nobody has bothered to change from the first standard that was invented, even though it was invented to slow you down.

[shane39]

'J's easy - it's got a bump on the key :-)

 

So it does..I never noticed that... F does as well.Why is that?

[dosxuk]

So it does..I never noticed that... F does as well.Why is that?

 

It's so you can "re-home" your fingers on those keys without having to look - one bump per hand. The 5 on the number pad has one too for when you need to use that.

[PeteMorris]

I'm sure I saw something on 'Click' the other morning on the Beeb about some new touchpad or other, and I'm sure they said you can select the type of keyboard layout that you want or prefer. Unless I was dreaming, which is entirely possible, as it was on at stupid-O-Clock on Saturday morning

[Jeffrey Shaw]

So it does..I never noticed that... F does as well.Why is that?

 

It's so you can "re-home" your fingers on those keys without having to look - one bump per hand. The 5 on the number pad has one too for when you need to use that.

It's to aid the blind and partially-sighted.

[altus]

It's to aid the blind and partially-sighted.

 

It's actually to aid touch typists. Blind users of course are automatically touch typists.

 

There's a US patent on the idea from 2002 but that's just an example of how crap the US patent system is - I have a keyboard from 1987 with bumps on the F and J keys.