Newsgroups: alt.folklore.science, alt.folklore.urban
Followup-To: alt.folklore.urban
From: Hoey@AIC.NRL.Navy.Mil (Dan Hoey)
Date: 1997/05/02
Subject: Re: Two engineer-related stories

schne...@gold.tc.umn.edu (Mike Schneider) writes:

> I found these two stories in sci.engr and was wondering about their
> veracity....

[ snip railroad hoax ]

> > And the reason we have the QWERTY keyboard was so that early
> > typewriters woudl not jam when fast typists caused the keys to hit
> > one another as they moved from the semi-circular array toward the
> > platen.

That's a fairly accurate version of the principle behind the QWERTY
design.  Unfortunately, your explanation is tends to be misunderstood,
due to the Rover phenomenon.  When you tell your dog "Bad dog Rover,
don't chew the carpet," Rover hears "yadda yadda Rover yadda yadda"
and goes on chewing the carpet.  A lot of people read that way, too.

An example of the Rover phenomenon is mlor...@dns.microsoft.com
reading "yadda yadda QWERTY yadda yadda" and deciding you were talking
about the widely spread belief that non-QWERTY keyboards are so far
superior to QWERTY they would be adopted immediately if we weren't
locked in by inertia.  He pointed out an article in _Reason_ magazine
article (http://www.reasonmag.com/9606/Fe.QWERTY.html) by Liebowitz
and Margolis, which argues against that other legend.  It has nothing
to do with your question.

But even people who try to read beyond the first few words of your
explanation run into problems, because the geometry of typewriters
is not obvious from the explanation.  Rover hears "yadda yadda fast
typists made the keys jam yadda yadda" which has given rise to a form
of the legend that goes

  "QWERTY was designed to slow down typists so the typewriters
  wouldn't jam."

which is complete nonsense, although it's been spread widely.  So to
avoid this sort of misunderstanding, I advocate the positive form:

  "QWERTY was designed to permit faster typing by placing
  commonly-used pairs of letters far apart, so their type bars would
  get out of each other's way faster."

This is accurate according to the explanation in the the New Hacker's
Dictionary, (e.g. http://kcmo.com/text/jargn10.txt), but Eric Raymond
unfortunately fails to give sources for the information.  This is
also supported by other Liebowitz and Margolis articles available
http://wwwpub.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/, which you can find referenced
from the _Reason_ magazine page.  They refer to a number of historical
documents, but I did not find direct quotations to original sources
about the QWERTY design.  I would like more definitive corroboration;
I vaguely recall reading supporting excerpts from the Sholes patent,
but I don't have access to that now.

I notice that Simon Slavin alleged on Monday that QWERTY was
designed for separating pairs of keys and _also_ to "make the layout
unfamilliar so the user would have to spend longer looking for the
next key".  I do not believe this to be accurate; I suspect it is a
variant of the "slowing down typists" legend.  He provided no
historical corroboration, of course.

Dan Hoey
Hoey@AIC.NRL.Navy.Mil