Dvorak History
By John W. Shipman
Here's a brief summary of the history of the Dvorak
keyboard.
The Dvorak keyboard is an offshoot of the work of Frank
Gilbreth, the father of time and motion (efficiency) study; see the
popular book "Cheaper by the Dozen" by Gilbreth and Carey for part
of Gilbreth's story.
Once Gilbreth began to make a name for himself, he hired some
other folks to use his methods to look for places where efficiency
could be improved.
In about 1930, Dr. August Dvorak, an American from Seattle (I've
heard that he is distantly related both to Antonin Dvorak the
composer and John Dvorak the iconoclastic computer columnist),
undertook a study of efficiency in the office. He almost
immediately discovered the awful history of the QWERTY
keyboard.
Christopher Sholes, the inventor of the typewriter (ca. 1870),
invented the QWERTY layout by trial and error. In his early
typewriter, the type slugs hit the bottom of the platen and then
fell back down. Because Sholes didn't think of putting return
springs on the type slugs, he had trouble getting any speed out of
the machine because the type slugs would jam. So he moved the
characters around in a way that made the most common combinations
hard to type, in order to SLOW THE TYPIST DOWN so that jams would
not occur.
In practical terms, then, Sholes anti-engineered the keyboard.
Dvorak found that the QWERTY arrangement is actually considerably
worse than a random arrangement!
After uncovering this horror story, Dvorak started an intensive
study of keyboarding. He made movies of people typing, and analyzed
them to find out what operations slowed them down. He experimented
with a large number of alternative arrangements, arriving at what
he called the American Simplified Keyboard (ASK), after about ten
years of work.
Dvorak spent decades trying to promote his arrangement. At the
end of his life (he died in the 1970s, I think), he was a very
bitter man, because he got nowhere fighting the huge inertia of the
organizations that make and use typewriters.
The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) actually
approved a version of the Dvorak layout as an "alternative"
standard at one point in the 1970s; I can probably dredge this
document up if anyone is interested.
I first read Dvorak's story in an article in "Computers and
Automation" magazine in 1971 (again, I can dig up the citation if
anyone wants it), in an article aptly titled "The Dvorak Simplified
Keyboard: Forty Years of Frustration." This article has the whole
sad story of Dr. Dvorak's quixotic battles, and a lot of detail
about the advantages of the keyboard.
I don't type for a living, but in my work writing programs and
documentation I probably spend at least a couple of hours a day
keyboarding. In about 1980, I had been touch-typing for 18 years on
QWERTY and could do about 35 words per minute. After 14 years on
Dvorak, I can do about 80 wpm, and I can still do about 30 on
QWERTY when I use unconverted equipment. Not only do I go much
faster on the DSK, but my error rate is much lower, because there
are much fewer awkward strokes. I find that the DSK is much less
fatiguing. Although I have no proof, I feel that because of the
greatly reduced finger motion, a DSK user will be much less prone
to repetitive strain injuries. I think this would be a good thing
to study.
[...]
--
John W. Shipman, Zoological Data Processing, 507 Fitch Avenue NW,
Socorro, NM 87801; phone, (505) 835-0235; e-mail, js_AT_minos.nmt.edu