QWERTY keyboard was not designed to slow down

Rosch QWERTY　keyboard layout relation

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RE: acquired skills
I.M. Anonymous @ 4/13/2002 1:44:08 PM #

FYI: the QWERTY keyboard layout was not designed to slow down speeders using the Dvorak layout.

For more information, check out this URL:
http://web.mit.edu/jcb/www/Dvorak/
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RE: acquired skills
I.M. Anonymous @ 4/15/2002 10:11:34 AM #

The qwerty keyboard was designed specificaly to slow down typists. Back in the days of keys making swinging bars with letters on them hitting the paper, if you hit the keys too quickly two bars would come up at the same time and get stuck. So the qwerty keyboard was designed to slow typists down a little by breaking up where the common use letters were and to spread out those common letters so that there was a bigger pause between them so that the bars would not get stuck.

Then, they also built in a little "marketing trick" in that you could very quickly type out "type writer" on the top line without the bars gettin stuck.
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http://web.mit.edu/jcb/www/Dvorak/
The Dvorak Keyboard

The Dvorak keyboard, named for its inventor, Dr. August Dvorak, was designed with the goal of maximizing typing efficiency. For over a century, typists have been using the qwerty keyboard arrangement, a hack that was implemented to work around the mechanical limitations of early typewriters.

Contrary to popular opinion, the qwerty design was not actually invented to slow typists down. Rather, the layout was intended to place common two-letter combinations on opposite sides of the keyboard. On manual typewriters, each key is mechanically connected to a lever that has the reversed image of a letter on it. If a typist were to hit two keys on the same side of the keyboard in rapid succession, the second lever on its way up would hit the first on its way down, the keys would become stuck together, and the typist would have to stop typing and unstick the keys. The qwerty layout was a clever design that minimized this problem. However, now that most of us use computers (or electric typewriters that don't use levers), the problem of keys jamming is no longer a consideration. Also, computers now enable us to switch layouts while continuing to use the same equipment.