United States Patent: 3929216:Input keyboards：その２

→　United States Patent: 3929216:Input keyboards：その２

For several generations, inventors have sought to correct the deficiencies of the universal keyboard. They have proposed setting common letters directly under the eight fingers of both hands to reduce stroking movements and make the middle row a true home row. They have advocated curved key rows to fit the hand, and raised key tops to compensate for differences in finger length. They have suggested splitting the keyboard in two, and moving the shift keys to the center of the keyboard to be operated by the thumb or fourth fingers. These geometric innovations, however, have been frustrated by the poor arrangement of letters and controls which masks any improvements due to spacial changes.

The standard keyboard has remained unchanged, despite its defects. Manufacturers would not make typewriters with a new keyboard unless a market existed for them. Businessmen would not order such machines unless employees could operated them. Schools would not teach a new keyboard unless it was used by the business world. The ensuing impass has blocked progress and left the universal keyboard firmly entrenched.

A new keyboard will not be adopted unless it yield substantial economic benefits. Initially the most promising applications will be in fields where input is a major expense. An example is computerized typesetting where keyboarding now represents approximately 80% of the cost. Another field is data processing, where data input accounts for about 40% of the expense. Considerable savings should be possible because operators currently execute an averagee of 12,000 strokes an hour (three characters a second) during a working day.

To win commercial acceptance, a new keyboard must lead to faster entry (50 to 100%) and lower error rates. To overcome entrenched resistance, employees must be able to acquire stroking facility in a short time (100 hours or less), and secure greater speed and accuracy after brief training than is possible on the standard keyboard after extended practice.

Rapid entry depends on the skill and training of operators, as well as the layout and arrangement of the keys. Efficient training is important because of the initial absence of skilled operators and the reluctance of experienced personnel to exchange a keyboard they know for one that is unfamiliar. Individuals must be taught who are already proficient on the standard keyboard, as well as those who have little or no experience. Instruction must lead quickly to stroking facility and confirm the ease of mastering a new key arrangement. Swift progress during early training is necessary to win acceptance and encourage executives to bear the cost and inconvenience of teaching employees to operate new equipment.

Previous inventors have slighted the problem of teaching a new key configuration. They have presented calculations of stroking efficiency, but ignored the fact that substantial differences between competing designs do not appear until considerable entry speeds are reached. At low and moderate rates (below five characters a second) the presence of awkward movements is masked because keys are stroked one at a time. At higher rates, clumsy movements impair performance by hindering chain stroking in which one finger prepares for a stroke while another one is being made. This gap in entry rates from one character to five characters a second is precisely the difference that separates a novice from a skilled operator on the standard keyboard. Unless this gap can be bridged quickly and economically, the utility of a new keyboard will be nullified by the expense and difficulty of reaching skills where its superiority becomes evident.

Earlier inventors have failed to develop effective instruction materials that lead to fast input and early chain stroking. The history of the Dovrak-Dealey keyboard is revealing in this respect. Ever since its invention in 1932, the Dvorak keyboard has been advocated as a replacement for the universal keyboard. Its advantages have been described in newspapers, magazines, and technical journals, but despite this publicity, the keyboard has not gained a foothold in the business world.

A major reason is the absence of learning materials that utilize the simplified motions occurring on the Dvorak keyboard. Training exercises have mimicked instruction methods employed on the standard keyboard by concentrating on individual letters rather than stroking sequences. Consequently most operators who learn the Dvorak keyboard do not acquire chain stroking, and are unable to demonstrate its superiority under actual working conditions.

Sound keyboard design and effective instruction must be based on the statistical properties of the language and the kinesthetic capacity of the brain and fingers. Setting common letters directly under the fingers of each hand improves stroking efficiency. Additional principles are required, however, to fix the arrangement of letters because of the large number of possible permutations.

Eight letters can be arranged in 8!=40,320 ways. If the most frequent vowel and the most frequent consonant are placed under the third finger of each hand, 6!=720 distinct keyboards can be formed with the remaining six letters. Finally, if four common vowels are set under the fingers of one hand, and four common consonants under the fingers of the other hand, 4!.times.4!=576 arrangements are possible.

In view of this host of alternatives, when even a small number of keys is involved, further principles must be employed to reduce the number of possibilities and restrict competing designs to a few keyboards possessing comparable efficiencies. Alternate designs must be evaluated numerically, since direct experimental tests are not feasible. Such tests are ruled out because of the time and expense of training operators, the large number of subjects required for statistically valid results, and the contamination of test scores by variations in the skill, instruction, and practice materials used by operators on different keyboards.

Empirical studies reveal that the fastest strokes are made on alternate hands when one finger prepares to make a stroke while another finger is striking a key. The time taken to complete successive strokes increases with their motor difficulty. These strokes are in order of difficulty: strokes on home keys by alternate hands; strokes on different rows by alternate hands; strokes on home keys by the same hand; strokes on a home key and a key in another row by different fingers of the same hand; strokes outside the home keys by different fingers of the same hand; and strokes on different keys by the same finger.

For skilled operators, the slowest strokes take three times longer than the fastest ones. Therefore for rapid entry, a majority of successive strokes should be made by alternate hands on home keys, and a minimum by the same finger on different keys.

Dvorak and Dealey applied these findings to develop a simplified keyboard for the English language based on kinesthetic and linguistic principles (U.S. Pat. No. 2,048,248). They recognized that twoletter combinations must be considered as well as single letter frequencies because the time required for a particular stroke depends on its immediate predecessor. Dvorak and Dealey employed a table of English digraph frequencies to determine the letter arrangement on their simplified keyboard. They set vowels on the home row of the left hand--and high-frequency consonants on the home row of the right hand. Punctuation marks and rare consonants were assigned to the left hand--and the remaining consonants to the right hand.

This choice remedies many of the faults of the standard keyboard. Separating vowels and consonants increases alternate hand motions. Placing consonants under the right hand insures that a majority of two-letter digraphs are stroked by the agile right hand. Dvorak and Dealey demonstrated the superiority of their keyboard by calculating the relative frequency of different strokes and comparing them with those on the standard keyboard which overworks some fingers and demands many difficult stroking motions. Dvorak and Dealey catalogued these difficult motions and proved numerically that operating the universal keyboard is a taxing kinesthetic task.

Although the Dvorak keyboard marked a major advance, it has significant limitations. It retains the clumsy geometric configuration of the standard keyboard with its crooked reaches to adjacent rows--and leaves shift keys at the corners to be stroked by the little finger. Operating the Dvorak keyboard requires only nine fingers--eight fingers to input the letters, and a thumb to strike the space bar. The placement of letters is not optimum. The p appears on the vowel side of the keyboard, which leads to many one-hand motions. The u lies under the fourth finger of the left hand, rather than the i which occurs twice as often.

On the theoretical side, the Dvorak-Dealey table of digraphs is incomplete. It omits double letters which account for 1.7% of the letters and spaces in English. It also ignores the space, although the space is the commonest character in English, accounting for one out of every six characters. (The same mistake was made by Roy Griffin who proposed a "Minimotion" keyboard based on an elaborate statistical study of digraph frequencies that erroneously disregarded the space separating words.) Space-letter digraphs are important because a majority of words begin and end with a consonant on the right side of the keyboard. Therefore using the right thumb to stroke the space bar on the Dvorak keyboard, following the practice on the standard keyboard, leads to many onehand strokes.

United States Patent: 3929216:Input keyboards：その１

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United States Patent: 3929216:

United States Patent 3,929,216
Einbinder December 30, 1975
Input keyboards

Abstract

Input keyboards are disclosed for typewriters, computer terminals, and other devices processing alphanumeric information that maximize entry rates and stroking accuracy, and minimize finger motions and the time needed to master the keyboard. A general method is also disclosed of designing such keyboards for any alphabetic language. The invention places the space key and four common vowels directly under the fingers of the left hand, and five common consonants directly under the fingers of the right hand. Two-finger chord strokes generate common two-character sequences belonging to the same hand. The keyboards are split into rotated halves containing curved key rows and slanted key tops of variable height to follow the architecture of the hand. The invention includes keyboards for English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.
Inventors: Einbinder; Harvey (New York, NY)
Appl. No.: 05/394,516
Filed: September 4, 1973

Current U.S. Class: 400/484 ; 400/109; 400/486; 400/488; 400/489; 400/492
Current International Class: B41J 5/00 (20060101); B41J 5/10 (20060101); G06F 3/023 (20060101); B41J 005/10 ()
Field of Search: 197/9,98,99,100
References Cited [Referenced By]
U.S. Patent Documents

1395049 October 1921 McNamara
1468566 September 1923 Hall
2080457 May 1937 Bower
2102526 December 1937 Guilfoyle
2369807 February 1945 Solon
3698532 October 1972 Dodds
Foreign Patent Documents

808,874 Feb., 1937 FR
1,255,117 Nov., 1967 DT
2,017,063 Oct., 1970 DT
174,678 Apr., 1935 CH

Other References

"The Tyranny of Qwerty," Charles Lekberg, Sat. Rev., Sept. 30, 1972, pp. 37-40..

Primary Examiner: Burr; Edgar S.
Assistant Examiner: Sewell; Paul T.

Description

DESCRIPTION OF THE PRIOR ART

The keyboard is an interface between man and the machines producing this written language. During recent decades, major advances have been made in the means of generating this written language. Electric typewriters have replaced manual machines, Electronic word processing devices are displacing electric typewriters, and computer controlled photocomposers are surplanting linotype machines. Yet despite these technical advances, an ancient, inefficient keyboard devised a hundred years ago has remained undisturbed.

Operators throughout the world use essentially the same keyboard, even though they input material in a variety of alphabets whose letters have different frequencies and combine in different ways. Consequently operators are forced to struggle with a keyboard whose arrangement of letters and controls disregards the properties of the language they are processing and the geometry of the human hand.

This incompatibility is a product of the history of the universal keyboard, which is a direct descendant of the manual typewriter invented in America a century ago. As early as 1878, the Remington typewriter reproduced the arrangement of letters and punctuation marks appearing on the contemporary keyboard. This American keyboard was adopted as an international standard in 1888, and was swiftly accepted in European countries with only minor modifications to meet the needs of different languages. Thus on the German keyboard, the o and a appear at the right-hand end of the home row, and the y and z are interchanged because the y is extremely rare in German. Similar changes have been made in other European languages, but for practical purposes, their keyboards are essentially equivalent. Such uniformity might be helpful if individuals processed information in many languages, but this is rarely the case. Instead operators are burdened with a keyboard that ignores the statistical characteristics of their native language.

The linotype keyboard used in printing is even more inefficient. It consists of ninety keys arranged in six rows. Lower-case letters are assigned to the left hand, and upper-case letters to the right hand. Because of mechanical limitations in early linotype machines, the commonest letters are alloted to the little and second fingers of the left hand. The a, e, i, o, n and t are assigned to the little finger, and the u, d, h, l, r, and s to the second finger. This arrangement prevents rapid input because of the long vertical reaches to strike keys in different rows and the large number of successive strokes made by the little and second fingers of the left hand. This clumsy layout is still retained in contemporary linotype machines, even though the mechanical restrictions that originally dictated this choice no longer apply.

The defects of the universal typewriter keyboard emerged fifty years ago as the proficiency of typists improved and touch typing became widespread. Today these deficiencies are even clearer. Fingers dart over the standard keyboard executing complex stroking patterns. The middle row is not a true home row. In English, 52% of the letter strokes occur on the top letter row, 33% on the middle row, and 15% on the bottom letter row.

The universal keyboard is a left-hand arrangement in a righthanded world. The left hand executes more difficult strokes than the agile right hand. Approximately 2,700 common words may be keyed by the left hand, but only 300 by the right hand. Half the successive letters in representative prose passages lie on the same hand, which is the same fraction that would occur if the keys were randomly distributed. Some of these sequences require three or four strokes by the same hand, which are slower and more difficult to complete than strokes on alternate hands. Many common digraphs must be keyed by the same finger. Striking successive keys with the same finger is very slow because fingers cannot prepare for a second stroke while the first one is being made. Examples include combinations involving the r and t, the c and e, the u and n, and the l and o.

About 30% of the motions on the universal keyboard are hard to execute. The include awkward reaches from the home row, successive strokes by the same finger, and hurdles across the home row to operate keys on the top and bottom letter rows. Because of the absence of a true home row, mastering the standard keyboard demands considerable dexterity, since the hands are in constant motion reaching for keys on different rows.

The location of letters and controls ignores the varying strength of individual fingers. Shift keys are operated by the little finger, which requires considerable effort on manual machines. Mechanical necessity a century ago fixed the geometric location of keys, which has remained unchanged. The straight key rows do not follow the contours of the hand; the staggered vertical key array in adjacent rows are awkward to strike. Fingers must traverse oblique paths to reach keys on different rows, and the weak little fingers must operate the shift keys at the corners of the keyboard. Such awkward movements produce muscular fatigue, since operators may complete 50,000 to 80,000 key strokes during an average working day.

Mastering the standard keyboard requires extensive practice. Modest facility generally takes 50 to 100 hours. Resulting speeds usually do not exceed three to five strokes a second even after lengthy training. For every hour of practice, input rates typically increase by only one stroke a minute, due to the complexity of required finger movements. Error rates are essentially independent of stroking skill, ranging from one to four errors a minute. Errors are increased by the poor location of keys and the inefficient arrangement of letters and controls. Errors are distributed over so many possibilities, they cannot be effectively reduced by practicing on a specialized vocabulary. Research studies show that special exercises are ineffectual in improving keyboard facility. All finger motions must be practiced at the same time using ordinary English to supply letter combinations in accordance with their natural frequency.

The standard keyboard has been repeatedly criticized in Europe because of its American origin and neglect of Continental linguistic differences. European languages cannot be processed efficiently on this keyboard. In German, 46% of the successive letter strokes are made by the same hand, which is close to the values for a random arrangement of letters. The left hand executes 58% of the letter strokes--the more agile right hand 42%. The eight keys directly under the fingers account for only 24% of the letter strokes on the German keyboard. The middle row is not a true home row, since 49% of the strokes are made on the top letter row, 32% on the middle row, and 19% on the bottom row.

Keyboards and keying An annotated bibliography

Keyboards and keying An annotated bibliography of the literature from 1878 to 1999
雑誌 Universal Access in the Information Society
出版社 Springer Berlin / Heidelberg
ISSN 1615-5289 (Print) 1615-5297 (Online)
号 Volume 1, Number 2 / 2001年10月
カテゴリー Bibliography
DOI 10.1007/s102090100012
ページ 99-160
Subject Collection コンピュータ サイエンス
SpringerLink 日付 2004年2月19日

著者
Karl H.E. Kroemer1

1Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24060-0118, USA; E-mail: kroemer@vt.edu
抄録

. This bibliography covers the period from 1878 through 1999. It contains, in chronological order, a thorough sampling of the literature concerning the design and use of keyboards. The sources are selected and annotated to reflect the status of engineering and technology know-how, and knowledge about ergonomic aspects of the use of the keyboards with, first, mechanical typewriters, then electric typewriters and finally, from the 1960s on, computers. The bibliography illustrates the origin of Sholes’ 1878 QWERTY keyboard and its continued use in spite of its many shortcomings, which may be – at least partially – the reason for cumulative trauma disorders in yesteryear’s typists and today’s keyboarders.

キーワード
Key words: Keyboards – Keyboarding – Typing – Ergonomics – Cumulative trauma disorders

Griffith『The Minimotion Typewriter Keyboard』patent

Griffith『The Minimotion Typewriter Keyboard』patent

Abstract：The minimotion typewriter keyboard

Journal of the Franklin Institute
Volume 248, Issue 5, November 1949, Pages 399-436

Copyright © 1949 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.

The minimotion typewriter keyboard　*1 *2
Roy T. Griffith

Available online 31 October 2003.

Abstract
his paper first points out the defects of the typewriter keyboard now in general use, then describes the design of a keyboard that overcomes these defects and is claimed to afford the greatest attainable ease in writing average English. This is accomplished by determining the optimum key assignments to minimize hard motions (and maximize easy motions), whence the apt name “MINIMOTION.”

The present paper concludes with a discussion of the outlook for general adoption of the MINIMOTION keyboard.

Appendices present statistical tabulations of the usage of single and adjacent letters in average English, convenient terminology for analyzing typewriter keyboards in respect to the motions required to write average English, and the comparative results of analyzing several keyboards. These appendices provide sufficient information that the basic statistics and the analysis methods can be applied to any keyboard.

*1 Patent applied for.

*2 This article copyrighted 1949 by Grace Haight Griffith.

1 Deceased. Formerly, Assistant Engineer in Charge of Transmission, Western Area, Bell Telephone Company of Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Pa.