The QWERTY keyboard Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

The QWERTY signaliseboard - Essay ExampleA quintessentially American invention, the QWERTY design demonstrates one of the key principles of human development the triumph of culture over logic and the survival of a tradition which whitethorn not be the fittest for purpose, but certainly wins the prize for durability under pressure. The initial design of the typewriter keyboard was do by an intention to slow down the writing process, for technical reasons due to the tendency of the metal keys to arrive if they were go too fast (Baron 27). Through trial and error, early type writer inventor Christopher Latham Sholes from Milwaukee came up with the mechanically optimal parade of characters in four rows, all in upper case (David 333). A further refinement was added by production partner Remington in the form of a letter compounding which allowed the word TYPEWRITER to be formed using only the top row of characters. (David 27). So it was that the combined demands of applied science limitations and sales ambition led to the final QWERTY format. As is the way of things in the modern world, technology moved on rather rapidly, and competitors soon appeared on the horizon, eager to take the ideas that had gone before and transform them into something break up and cheaper than existing models. The so-called Ideal keyboard appeared in the 1870s, using the sequence DHIATENSOR in the top row, ground on a calculation of the frequency of letter use in the English language these ten earn were sufficient to produce over 70 per cent of words in English (David 334). Other ideas which induce emerged since then include the use of an arrangement based on alphabetical order and the famous Dvorak layout which places the to the highest degree common consonants in the central right hand position and the vowels on the left. The aim of this distribution is to make out the distance between the most common letters, and encourage left and right hands to work in sequence (Bridger 3 80) with the result that typing on this keyboard layout becomes both faster and more accurate than the original QWERTY arrangement. The Dvorak arrangement (see figure 1 below) was named after its creator Dr August Dvorak, and the patent was filed in 1936, at a epoch when industrial factory-style systems were common, and typing pools were set up as a way of speeding up military control communications. Fig. 1 QWERTY and Dvorak keyboards compared. Source Bridger, p. 381. On the face of it, these alternative layouts look like eminently sensible improvements based on a desire to better match the machine layout to the natural attributes of the human hands and mind. In practice, however, these later layouts have been rejected by mainstream typewriter and later also computer production in favor of the early QWERTY version. This raises the question why the older model has stuck, and improvements have been rejected. The answer comes down to a conspiracy of different factors. Some of these are due to the momentum that the QWERTY layout gained in the critical years of atomization in the United States. As companies were set up they designed integrated systems which fed into each other, so that for manakin sales, processing of orders and invoicing were conducted by letter and telephone, and instead of handwritten ledgers, typewritten documents were used, and then retained in filing systems. peck were appointed to undertake these tasks, equipment was bought, training was provided and everyone