I recently (re)read some of Stephen Jay Gould's wonderful articles he published in the 80s and 90s (1980s, I mean). Gould (1941-2002) who was a paleontologist and educator at Harvard University made his largest contributions to science as the leading spokes-person for evolutionary theory. He wrote very imaginative and accessible monthly columns in Natural History magazine that have been gathered in an abundant bibliography of over 20 books with appealing titles, like the "Panda's Thumb" or the "Flamingo's Smile".
Gould used to write his texts on an old Smith-Corona typewriter (similar to the one above), and was then teased by one of his friends (Paul A. David, Clio and the economics of QWERTY – 1986) about the letters arrangement (named QWERTY for English typewriters). Gould's article is particularly rich, with provocative implications in many aspects of the IT business, from the uselessness of ROI studies to the power of marketing and necessity of being lucky.
Typewriters have been invented in the 70s and 80s (1870s, I mean) and it took a few decades to stabilize their technical organization as well as their user interface: the keyboard.
Many different keyboard organizations competed before it stabilized under the well-known aspect of the QWERTY suite. The reason for QWERTY supremacy is not that obvious: it is not linked to the rapidity of typing, as you might think at first. Would typewriter manufacturers maximize speed, they would have put the letters DHIATENSOR in the most accessible line (the middle one), as 70% of English words can be written from this small list of letters. On the contrary, QWERTY is the result of fine-tuning (by C.L. Sholes) to slow down typing speed! At this time the main problem was that, when writing too fast, typebars tend to hurt and block among themselves, provoking d ff jmleesd kkjjjjjg disasters… And this is why QWERTY was designed to make people's life more difficult!
Finally, QWERTY victoriously resisted to all further attacks, from the optimized DSK (Dvorak Simplified Keyboard) in the 30s (1930s…), the IBM Selectric and its famous "gulf ball" in the 60s and finally the computer industry in the 80s that produces the laptop computer I'm writing on at the moment.
Isn't the vision of millions (if not billions) of humans fighting with the apparently random organization of their keyboard at home, at school or at work, because of technical constraints that disappeared 80 years ago, a really stimulating and refreshing one ?
Reference: Stephen Jay Gould, the panda's thumb of technology, in Bully for Brontosaurus – 1991
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