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.