Feb 10, 2012 5 min read

Like a backwards Terminator, your keyboard is sent from the past designed to fight you.

Let me explain, dear reader: the humble keyboard — a device many of us spend a majority of our days tethered to — is laid out in the QWERTY pattern (so named for the top-left letters of the keyboard) that is specifically designed to make the act of typing slower and more difficult.

That’s because the QWERTY keyboard (that would be the layout of, statistically speaking, every keyboard you’ve ever used) is a vestige of the days of carriage returns and ink ribbons. Designed for the typewriter, QWERTY has letters laid out so that the keys used most often are spread out, since nearby keys struck in rapid succession resulted in the dreaded jamming of the typewriter’s metal arms.

(For those born in the 1990s, a typewriter jam is kind of like a computer crash … and a typewriter, for that matter, is — oh forget it.)

The penchant for jamming led Christopher Sholes, the pioneer of commercial typewriters, to devise a layout to slow down keystrokes, and that pattern, QWERTY, is the one we still use to this day. This means, and I don’t mean to upset the apple cart here, that every keyboard you’ve ever used was designed so that a typewriter could work well — rather than so you could work well.

And since we’re pointing out oft-overlooked details about a device we use every day, this is as good a time as any to point out that he landed on this layout in 1873.

Yes, 1873.

Which means you’re regularly using a 139-year-old technology to interact with your 21st century gadgets. So how is it that we’re still using the same layout for typing that was developed — again, with increasing difficulty as the goal — back when Ulysses S. Grant was still in the White House?

Inertia and teachers.

Think about it, when the first computers appeared, they were modeled after the typewriter, since most offices were already chock full of them and the transition would be that much easier. But even when younger generations began to prepare for the workforce, they were still prepared by teachers who grew up using typewriters. And even as students who have never seen a typewriter in real life (or only in zoos), learn to type, they are relegated to using the keyboard layout of their grandparents. It’s a vicious cycle.

So we’re using an anachronism to type everything from Web addresses to TPS reports — what’s the big deal? Speed and accuracy, my friend.

When looking to improve your typing, you need to look at the home row (that’s where you fingers lay at rest, with your pointers on F and J). If you think about it, if the keyboard was designed to make you a better typist (which we know it was not) most of your typing should happen on the home row, since that’s where your fingers are. But when typing in the QWERTY layout, only 32 percent of keystrokes are in that home row, so the majority of letters you need require you to reach up a row (52 percent) or down a row (16 percent) and increase the likelihood of errors and slow you down.

This is the basic concept behind the Dvorak layout, which was patented in 1936 as an alternative to the QWERTY. The layout was designed by Dr. August Dvorak and his brother-in-law, Dr. William Dealey, for the typist, not the typewriter.

On a Dvorak keyboard, the most commonly used letters are found on the home row, meaning there are upwards of 5,000 words you can type without ever moving your fingers. Conversely, the QWERTY home row alone will only give you about 200, most of which would only count as words in a particularly erudite game of Scrabble.

In fact, 70 percent of all keystrokes are on the Dvorak home row (remember, your current home row is 32 percent) meaning with the Dvorak layout, you need about 40 percent less finger movement to type, increasing your speed and accuracy.

More than that, the Dvorak letters are laid out with vowels on your left and consonants on the right, so that most words see you using alternating fingers for each letter, giving your typing a much more natural rhythm. The Dvorak layout also is right hand-biased, since most people are right handed and have more accuracy on the right side of the keyboard. (The QWERTY layout, meanwhile, has only 300 right-hand only words and more than 3,000 words that are typed with only the weaker left hand.)

So outside of “we’ve always typed this way,” why are we still using a QWERTY keyboard? And what’s worse, why are we still teaching children to use them?

Isn’t it about time we leave 1873 behind?

If you’d like to know how difficult it was to touchtype while thinking about finger movements, Brandon Szuminsky can be reached at bszuminsky@heraldstandard.com.