Human-Nets-Request%rutgers@brl-bmd.UUCP (Human-Nets-Request@rutgers) (01/11/84)
HUMAN-NETS Digest Wednesday, 11 Jan 1984 Volume 7 : Issue 8
Today's Topics:
Input Devices - Typewriter Keyboards, History and Development,
Computers and the Law - Known Associates,
Computer Security - Passwording,
Computers and People - DOOMSDAY CLOCK
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Date: Sat 7 Jan 84 15:13:56-EST
From: Janet Asteroff <US.JFA@CU20B>
Subject: Typewriter Keyboards, History and Development
Since there seems to be some interest in typewriters, keyboards, etc.,
I thought it was time I dig back into my notes and get some documented
information. As a rule, I oppose long messages, so I will try to boil
everything down. Those not interested in this please skip it. Those
interested in it might send mail to me directly. There is a diagram
of the Dvorak keyboard further on, for those who are interested in
seeing the arrangement.
My M.A. essay several years ago was about the typewriter. Decided not
to do it for a dissertation since there were bigger fish to fry. My
focus was mainly on the typewriter and its role in print culture, its
place in social history in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Still, I have done much research on the more technical aspects of the
field, and culled my notes to see what I could contribute to this
discussion.
Historians and other scholars doing research about the past cannot
present "the truth," so I offer some of these research findings for
further exploration. Most scholars of the typewriter, Richard Current
(the only bona fide scholar) Bruce Bliven, and Wilfred Beeching,
present contradictory information on the keyboard, development,
marketing, etc. It is a tough area to research; the primary material
is incomplete, most of it is in Wisconsin (Sholes worked in
Milwaukee/Madison). Richard Current has the best book, The Typewriter
and the Men who Made It--he is a good historian. Bliven's book, That
Wonderful Writing Machine, well, the title speaks to its reliability.
Funded in part by Royal, it is good for little known facts that must
be documented elsewhere. Beeching runs a typewriter museum in England,
and his book, The Century of the Typewriter, is mostly all pictures,
and his information must be documented from other sources. He does
have lots of keyboards however--different languages, arrangements,
etc.
* The Sholes Keyboard and Some General Notes on the Typewriter
There were several different types of keyboards before QWERTY came
into being. Mentioned most was an alphabetic arrangement. The 1873
Sholes only typed in capital letters. The Caligraph, in 1883, had
separate rows of keys for upper and lower--about 8 rows in all. In the
first Sholes model, you could not see the type because of the
arrangement of the platen and basket. According to Current, the
problem was with the way the type bars hung in the basket, but he
offers no further explanation of this. He then goes on to state that
being a printer, Sholes and his partner Densmore arranged the keyboard
in the spirit of the printer's case. Not true, as my research shows.
The job case used in the 1870's was alphabetic. In the 1880's a new
job case came into being, and is used still today (where they still
exist). The principal is frequently used caps and then smaller
letters, i.e., b c d e i s f y and l m n h o p w -- are two of the
rows. So, Current is incorrect that it was modeled on the job case.
Current also continues that Sholes did not find it hard to switch from
an alphabetic arrangement to QWERTY. Then again, he wasn't typing for
20 years. He does point out that they did not study finger movements.
The major consideration was to have all the keyboards ALIKE--for
production, manufacture and sales. They had to standardize the
keyboard. To digress for a minute, the typewriter was not a popular
machine in the 1870's. Remington almost went broke trying to sell it,
and eventually sold their rights to it. Sholes and Densmore also were
continually without funds, and they were not the first to try to
perfect the machine. It was only with the rise of big business in the
1890's (a need), and, a method of permanent inking, that the
typewriter found a considerable market. Hard to believe isn't it?
The typewriter was overshadowed by the telephone--which came out a few
years later.
Beeching presents some information about the alphabetic keyboard
jamming, so, Sholes' brother-in-law, a mathematician, came up with
QWERTY. This is a popular story, but I can't find any real
documentation for it.
So, it would appear that Sholes and Densmore, to solve technical
problems with the basket, as well as to keep the keys moving freely,
adopted the present arrangement. Home row, or second row, three other
rows, including numbers at the top. It has changed slightly, the X and
the Z used to be in different places, and the shift key was added
later. Essentially, the 1873 keyboard is what we have now.
* Dvorak Keyboard (with diagram)
Reference: "Business Week," October 16, 1933.
August Dvorak was a time and motion expert working at the Univ of
Washington and other places. He continued his work in the Navy during
the 1930's.
He first developed his keyboard in 1933, and the Navy used it. Divided
the labor just the opposite of the Sholes model-- 44% left hand 55%
right. The article claims the most frequently letters in the English
language are E T A O S I N R H L D C U. I have read elsewhere claims
that do not agree with this.
The arrangement of the DVORAK keyboard is, top row to bottom row:
bckspace ! 7 5 3 1 9 0 2 4 6 8 tab
? , . P Y F G C R L marel
shftlock A O E U I D H T N S -
shftkey ; Q J K X B M W V Z return
The illustration in Business Week differs from Beeching's slightly,
but the letters are all in the same place.
Another keyboard, just for fun, was the Fitch keyboard, c. 1886
X B M R N G T L P
J W O A E I U K Q
V S D H O Y F C Z
Look at Beeching to get an array of arrangements.
* General Observations
There are lots of interesting topics about the typewriter. One is the
method of inking. The Federal government did not start to use the
machine until the method of inking made permanent copies possible.
The newly-implemented civil service procedures allowed women to enter
government jobs, and they quickly became the typists because less
educated men did not have the proper literacy levels, and men as
educated found better jobs. The development of paper to fit into the
machine. The adding of the carriage return. Sholes 1873 model worked
with a foot tredle, like a sewing machine. What would he have thought
of the Selectric I wonder. Remington added the shift key--Sholes
models was all caps. The Caligraph, and several other models,had
separate keys for upper and lowercase.
Most of these are pretty technical, and deal with the nature of
invention. Our sophisticated analyses of hand-eye movements will
allow us to design better keyboards, although judging from the PCjr,
IBM really blew it in a different direction. I think we will move from
qwerty to programmable keyboards before we see any change in the
qwerty layout for regular crt terminals (not graphics or text
processing terminals perhaps).
My main area of interest has been the the path of social acceptance
and adoption. The resistance of the literati, the quick adoption in
business in the 1890's, the public's weariness, and interest in the
telephone. Much of the history of the role and use of the typewriter
is tied to the spread of literacy through the rise of public
education. Also, it was in competition with photography, phonograph,
etc. All what Daniel Boorstin calls 'the repeatable experience.'
The typewriter was the first personal interest of print culture--it
allowed people to make print themselves--for the first time. It will
be replaced by the computer terminal, so the typewriter is the ONLY
personal instrument of print culture. Combined with later
technologies, like carbon paper (very important--easy duplication),
the mimeograph machine, and much later, Xerography, one person could
be their own newspaper publisher, bookseller, or printer.
All the writers and others (humanist scholars) complaining about
computer print, word processing, etc. would do well to understand that
writing was once rightfully considered, at least by Plato, to be
external to the mind. We do not have the proper apparatuses to be
writers--we need pens and paper. Thought is the primary entity;
language is extension transference, and writing extends that. We have
the physical equipment for speech, but it took millions of years to
develop. Writers and scholars, particularly historian Barbara
Tuchman, who scream to the N Y Times about the death of the book and
writing, and what we computer types are doing to hasten it, are
probably using a typewriter anyway. I hope their keys jam.
I suppose as we move from print to electronic print, just as others
moved from an oral to a written society, or from one based on monastic
manuscripts to printed books, there will be lots of complaints,
yelling and screaming, as people happy with the way things are see
their way of life passing too quickly. Our research is sophisticated,
how well we will do with it is another matter. Transitions are
exciting times--also very difficult, since I suppose that are the
beginning of the revolution.
-- Janet Asteroff
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Date: 7 January 1984 19:20 EST
From: Robert Elton Maas <REM @ MIT-MC>
Subject: Thoughtcrime / known associates
If the use of the known-associates database will be to get a list of
persons who may be able to supply evidence then I don't see anything
wrong. Like if Vicki, with whom I danced at folk dance last week, is
accused of dealing drugs, the FBI comes to my place and shows me her
picture and I say "Yeah, she's cute, I met her at folk dane" and the
FBI says "We think she may be dealing drugs" and I say "She seems
normal to me, doesn't talk about drugs or act funny or anything" and
the FTP says "Thank you for your time" and leaves to interview the
other hundred people she dances with or works with or plays tennis
with or whatever.
But if they think because I danced with her and she deal drugs that I
probably deal drugs too, they're off their gourd!!
Probably this database will actually help eliminate guilt by
association. In the past, it was difficult to get a complete list of
associates, maybe you had one or two, so it was easy to pretend the
one or two associates were in fact accomplices in crime, and to
violate those people's civil rights. It wasn't obvious you were being
selective, picking on just those one or two associates you happened to
know about and ignoring hundreds of equally-associative others. But
when the computer spills out five hundred "known associates" of Vicki
the dealer, maybe the FBI will be a little disciminating, bothering
the three or four who were themselves involved in drugs via another
route, and leaving alone the 496 or 497 other associates for which
there's absolutely no drug connection except being an acquaintance of
Vicki the dealer.
Rebuttal welcome.
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Date: 7 January 1984 20:20 EST
From: Robert Elton Maas <REM @ MIT-MC>
Subject: Passwords: Is there a better way ? (V6 #87)
To: adamm @ BBN-UNIX
That's a very bad idea. First of all, you have to carry around your
encryptor. That means it can be stolen from you (it's called "mugging"
except in the past it's been cash and credit cards that were stolen,
each of limited value, $30 or whatever you carry plus something like
$50 per credit card if you don't cancel the quickly), and now you
propose that your access code to all your work and private files be
stealable on the street! Second, if you lose it or it gets stolen, you
lose all your computer access until it's replaced.
I propose a different idea. You have such an encryptor box, but all
boxes are the same, you can replace them at Radio Shack if they get
lost or stolen. To activate one, you type a very long passmessage
nobody in a hundred years would ever guess, which gets converted into
a random public-key encryption key. (The passmessage is used to seed a
random number generator which is used to invent new pseudo-random
prime numbers or whatever, so with the same seed you get the same
key.) You can use that set-up plus a short verification key to make it
log you into any of your systems. If somebody steals your box and
can't guess your short verification key in three guesses, it erases
the encryption key, requiring the full passmessage to re-create it.
Meanwhile it scrambles memory with random numbers so the bias in
static RAM that makes it sometimes "remember" after power-off won't
enable an electronics-technician turned thief to read out the last
thing in memory before it was zeroed. Of course for your protection,
whenever you deliberately set your encryptor box aside you
deliberately give it a false verification key (a string of zeroes will
do, unless you were idiot enough to use all-zeroes as your
easy-to-guess verificatin key). Since nobody except you and your box
ever see either the long passmessage or the short verfication key, not
even the computers and modems you use, which see only your public key,
nobody can tap the phone or spy on system databases to reveal your
keys, and unlike the original proposal your box isn't a target for
theft except for its original purchase value (5 dollars? Your leather
or velcro wallet or wristwatch is worth more.)
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Date: 7 January 1984 03:15 EST
From: Jerry E. Pournelle <POURNE @ MIT-MC>
Subject: DOOMSDAY CLOCK at 3 minutes to midnight !!
If talks prevent war, how did Pearl harbor happen?
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End of HUMAN-NETS Digest
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