> In other words, the idea is that QWERTY was designed so that humans would type as slowly as possible in order to prevent mechanical jamming.
Nope. That's an oft cited story but it's not true. The point of QWERTY was actually to increase typing speed. The debunking of this is pretty well documented these days (there even a note on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY#Properties) so it's disappointing an article as researched as the one submitted here has made such an easy to check mistake.
But I think the bigger trap it falls into, and the same trap many on HN fall into when posting their anecdotes too, is that RSI isn't universally equivalent. It depends on hand sizes, the keyboards you use, any other hand exercises one might do, underlying health conditions, and even just how you hold your hands at the keyboard. So what might help alleviate RSI for one person could easily make it much worse for another person.
It does, but the article is pretty cagey in its retraction (including following up with the comment "Though on the other hand, jamming is really bad for typing speed!").
The author seems to me to at least partly still believe its true, merely acknowledging that it's a difficult position to maintain.
i am the author and i didn't mean to be wishy-washy about it. i read several of the papers involved and think it's more likely than not that qwerty was designed for fast typing, or at least not designed to type slowly. but i wouldn't say it's a done deal -- the paper i cited gives the most convincing argument, imo, but it didn't move me up to 100% confidence or anything. i didn't want to give the appearance of being too certain, because i'm not.
The confusion in many articles on the subject is because both the myth and the truth argue that QWERTY was designed to prevent hammer jams. The reason this confuses people is because anecdotally many people find QWERTY slower to find keys ergo many laymans assume QWERTY was designed to slow typing down to avoid jams (in fairness, it's not an unreasonable piece of logical deduction even if it's not technically accurate).
The reality was that typists were trained to type on QWERTY so they weren't slow typing on it. What QWERTY was designed to do was move common follow on characters further away from each other so the hammers jammed less often thus allowing trained typists to type faster than they could have on an alphabetized layout.
Given that the person you are replying to is the author, I'm guessing he probably does not "partly still believe it's true." I'm going to bang on the "give people generous readings" drum here, too: "Jamming is really bad for typing speed" is not "pretty cagey," it's "a humorous comment." (Also, you know, technically correct.)
The point of the QWERTY layout was to prevent jamming; the prototype layout was roughly alphabetical on the keyboard and jammed constantly, so it was refined to fix that mechanical problem.
The part that is a myth was that they prevented jamming by “slowing typists down”. What they did is moved commonly adjacently pressed letters apart from each-other so they wouldn’t be pressed at about the same time. This was not done explicitly to speed or slow typists (at the time, there was no established typing technique and there were no expert typists), except insofar as a constantly jammed keyboard was extremely slow.
But the nearness that mattered was in the ring of typebars on the Sholes/Glidden/Schwalbach/Densmore typewriter, not the nearness of the keys on the keyboard per se. This typewriter connected the keys to typebars which were placed around a ring and struck upward at the platen. The association between keys on the keyboard and the positions around the ring is not obvious.
They started by trying to place common English digraphs onto typebars at opposite ends of the ring, then swapped keys around via trial/error until they got the jamming problem mostly under control. Later the Remington company did a few more swaps so that "TYPEWRITER" could be typed entirely on the top row, as a marketing gimmick.
The true part of the common QWERTY criticism is that the layout of the keys was not decided primarily based on the positions on the keyboard or human hand anatomy. As a result, the keyboard layout per se (both the positioning of the physical keys themselves and the choice of association between letters and keys) is not especially efficient or ergonomic.
A related (milder) criticism can be leveled at the Dvorak layout, which was designed for the typewriter technology of ~1930, where the home row and top row of the keyboard were easy to press but the bottom row was much slower and less convenient, based on the consistent steep step between rows of keys. Computer keyboards have always had a different physical shape compared to 1930s typewriters, so the relative difficulty of typing different key combinations is different, and an optimized layout therefore looks different.
> The part that is a myth was that they prevented jamming by “slowing typists down”. What they did is moved commonly adjacently pressed letters apart from each-other so they wouldn’t be pressed at about the same time. This was not done explicitly to speed or slow typists (at the time, there was no established typing technique and there were no expert typists), except insofar as a constantly jammed keyboard was extremely slow.
Indeed, which was designed to speed typing up, hence my point. :)
> The true part of the common QWERTY criticism is that the layout of the keys was not decided primarily based on the positions on the keyboard or human hand anatomy. As a result, the keyboard layout per se (both the positioning of the physical keys themselves and the choice of association between letters and keys) is not especially efficient or ergonomic.
I get that but it doesn't take away from my point that the RSI complaint is hugely specific to the individual. Or to put it another way, if QWERTY were really as bad as the stories posted on HN make out then you'd see more cases of RSI given it is used by literally hundreds of millions of people every day.
I'm in my 40s and have been using QWERTY since the 70s without any side effects (I did start getting RSI in the arm from playing FPS every waking moment back when PC 3D FPS were new, but never from typing).
> A related (milder) criticism can be leveled at the Dvorak layout, which was designed for the typewriter technology of ~1930, where the home row and top row of the keyboard were easy to press but the bottom row was much slower and less convenient, based on the consistent steep step between rows of keys. Computer keyboards have always had a different physical shape compared to 1930s typewriters, so the relative difficulty of typing different key combinations is different, and an optimized layout therefore looks different.
Which again also misses my point that RSI depends on vastly more than just your keyboard layout.
There are an awful lot of people who develop RSI from keyboard use, nearly all of which is preventable. Better training would help a lot, but better designed equipment would also make a big difference. Changing the QWERTY association between keys and letters shouldn’t be the highest priority, but the advantage it has is that it can be done in software, without change to physical devices. Reshaping the keyboard to better match human anatomy would make a bigger difference.
> There are an awful lot of people who develop RSI from keyboard use, nearly all of which is preventable.
I'm not saying there aren't. What I'm saying is it's not directly because of the keyboard layout. You go on to say this yourself in the very same post as your point above:
> Changing the QWERTY association between keys and letters shouldn’t be the highest priority,
People talk too much about keyboard layout with regards to RSI and totally blank out all the other factors that contribute.
If the problem was only related to the keyboard layout and QWERTY is as bad as HN commenters make out, then we'd hear a lot more cases of RSI. But it isn't, which statistically suggests the problem is more nuanced. ie type of keyboard (mechanical, chiclet, even down to the specific manufacturer and the parts they've used), position of keyboard in 3D space relative to the operator, position of hands on keyboard, typing style, health of the operator, operator's workflow, etc. There are so many variables at play that blaming the keyboard layout had always struck me as a massively lazy deduction.
I think you dramatically underestimate how many people suffer from RSI and how much it affects their lives. In the US alone, we are talking about millions of people. In some surveys >50% of keyboard workers have complained about wrist pain from typing.
There was some planned OSHA office worker ergonomics enforcement in the late 1990s, carefully studied for a decade before being finally put into place in 2001 just as Clinton was leaving office, but it got killed by GOP congress and the Bush II administration. If not for that we would hear more about this problem, and there would be a lot more options for ergonomic keyboards today. Instead, this became a problem that employers blamed on their workers and left workers to figure out for themselves.
> position of keyboard in 3D space relative to the operator, position of hands on keyboard, typing style, health of the operator, operator's workflow, etc.
Yes of course. And things were to some extent better when almost all of the people using keyboards were trained professional secretaries.
From walking around large offices full of computer programmers, I would speculate that at least 3/4 of current office workers have inappropriately positioned and oriented keyboards; maybe even 90% or more.
The biggest problem (among many) with modern equipment/practice is that people type with unstraight wrists, slouch or lean over in their chairs, and stick their elbows out forward or way out to the side.
The keyboard should be held close to the torso and angled so that its top is parallel to the forearms (what this angle should be depends on relative height of torso and table or keyboard tray). Typists should keep their wrists as straight as possible (not flexed or extended; pronation is unfortunately unavoidable on a standard keyboard), and should have their palms and wrists “floating” above the keyboard while actively typing. The primary goal should be to avoid any nontrivial static load on any muscles throughout the body, and try to keep joint positions neutral.
Splitting the keyboard in half, separating the two halves by at least a few inches, and independently positioning and orienting each half can make a huge improvement.
> [If] QWERTY is as bad as HN commenters make out [...]
There are very few HN commenters who care at all about QWERTY, and even most of those are relatively ambivalent. It’s a design poorly matched to modern hardware, and changing it can make a nontrivial improvement, but it’s also not the main problem.
> I think you dramatically underestimate how many people suffer from RSI and how much it affects their lives.
I'm not saying it isn't high; I said it would be higher. The distinction here is vital, as I'll go on to explain...
> According to one survey, nearly 60 percent of computer office workers nationwide suffer from wrist pain while at the computer, and 51.2 percent say their keyboards are placed too high.
So more than 5/6 people who have keyboard related pains believe it is due to the placement of the keyboard.
Of those remaining ~15% of users, how many of them are getting pains due to other circumstances (keyboard type, other positions in 3D space, or even just their own posture)? How many of them might still have their keyboard too high and don't even realize it (those excluding them from the first category where they should have belonged)?
Hence why I said the number of complaints would be much higher if QWERTY itself was a major contributor to RSI because QWERTY is near universal whereas the other factors are not yet the other factors still vastly dominate the statistics.
As for the rest of your comment, you're literally just reiterating everything that I've already said to you in my past comments.
To summarize (because I think you're fixating on the detail and thus missing the overview for it): for all the talk about how "bad" QWERTY is, other environmental factors have a much more significant impact on the health of the typists.
The story about marketing and "TYPEWRITER" on the same row is also considered a myth by some historians, simply because Remington spelled it "Type-Writer" and - was not on that row.
That the layout was intended for typing at speed is corroborated by the fact that early users of (pre-Remington) typewriters were telegraphists who used them to transcribe telegrams from Morse code at the speed at which it was being received.
Fair enough about the Remington 'TYPEWRITER' story; I don’t have direct evidence there, only what I have read elsewhere (which could be apocryphal). Someone at Remington might have swapped R with . because they wanted to keep letters separate from punctuation, or the like.
Nope. That's an oft cited story but it's not true. The point of QWERTY was actually to increase typing speed. The debunking of this is pretty well documented these days (there even a note on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY#Properties) so it's disappointing an article as researched as the one submitted here has made such an easy to check mistake.
But I think the bigger trap it falls into, and the same trap many on HN fall into when posting their anecdotes too, is that RSI isn't universally equivalent. It depends on hand sizes, the keyboards you use, any other hand exercises one might do, underlying health conditions, and even just how you hold your hands at the keyboard. So what might help alleviate RSI for one person could easily make it much worse for another person.