From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!C70:editor-people Newsgroups: fa.editor-p Title: Article-I.D.: ucb.1762 Posted: Fri Aug 13 01:59:11 1982 Received: Sun Aug 15 05:38:51 1982 >From npois!houxf!hfavr@Berkeley Fri Aug 13 01:46:08 1982 There is indeed no serious movement to non-qwerty keyboards, simply because no other keyboard design has enough of an advantage to counter the costs of operator re-training and/or loss of standardization. It is true that the qwerty was designed to reduce key jamming by positioning co-occuring letters as far apart as possible; but as Gentner and Norman have found in their extremely thorough study of typing (see recent tech reports from CHIP at UCSD) positioning co-occuring letters far apart also makes for fast typing with low error rates. No other keyboard design, including the Dvorak, appears to improve average typing speed at equal error rates by more than a tenth or so in any adequately controlled experiment. Unfortunately, controlled experimentation is not the forte of true believers (in the Dvorak or anything else), so the crackpot keyboards (and the keyboard crackpots) are likely to be around for the forseeable future.