Reflections, Reflections

I ran into this post that talks about...

a new economic theory called Economic Geography which states that sometimes a less efficient product or system becomes the winner in the marketplace and thus the standardized technology, or system. And the further development of that market is path dependent, that going back and changing to the more efficient system would entail costs so huge that it becomes infeasible.

Although we all know this happens by simply living in our modern world and experiencing the joys of being subjected to inefficient technology monopolies, I, at least, didn't know some economics prof had justified their tenure privileges by giving it a nice name and writing on it.

Some notable examples of this are VHS beating out the smaller Betamax VCRs, or Unleaded Gasoline engines becoming the American standard over the more efficient Diesel engines, or even MS-DOS over Macintosh operating systems. But the gold-plated standard when discussing path dependency is the QWERTY keyboard. ...

Yes the very thing sitting beneath your fingers as you read this. The earliest typewriters used to jam whenever someone typed too fast. So the keyboard was redesigned into its current configuration to make the process of typing less efficient, to slow down typists and thus keep the typewriter from jamming.

That the QWERTY was designed to slow down typing is news to me! But I don't feel like reading more to ascertain the fact. I always thought it was just that the QWERTY designer wasn't all that smart to think about how to configure the letters in a way it would make it the most efficient layout for typing.

A more efficient keyboard would have all of the most used letters in that middle row so that the fingers would never have to be extended. Such has been designed, the Dvorak keyboard, and a Navy study showed that those who used the Dvorak typed twice as fast, made half the errors, and their fingers traveled 1/20 as far. This would over time cause fewer repetitive stress problems.

So why don't we switch over the the Dvorak keyboard? Because it would be too big of a hassle. Everyone would have to re-learn how to type. And a phase-in of the Dvorak keyboards would be difficult because offices would lose their ease of convertibility, just as offices today only have one type of computer.

Maybe we should change the name of QWERTY keyboard to the Microsoft keyboard. Or the Internet Explorer keyboard.

What I would like to know as well in terms of typing trivia, is what percentage of people who use computers actually type with the QWERTY at all? I still see a lot of people who do not know how to type (with all their fingers). They use mostly just their index fingers.

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