dkw (04/22/83)
>From "Mass High Tech" 11 April, 1983
The American National Standards Instituet (ANSI) has released ANSI X4.22
1983, codifying and modernising a keyboard design first proposed in the
1930's by August Dvorak.
Dvorak's Simplified Keyboard (DSK) was one of the first and most
long-lived attempts to arrange the typewriter keyboard with
consideration of both ergonomics and letter frequency in English language
words.
The article went on to discuss the possibility of multiple standard keyboards
for different languages, and perhaps for different types of work (the examples
given are novels and scientific treatises). That would be a real problem as
the one advantage of the standard (QWERTY) keyboard is that it is standard and
anyone who knows how to type can use and typewriter. There is some work ( I no
longer have the reference) showing that a person can only be fluent on one
keyboard at a time, and that the time to change back to a keyboard one was once
fluent on is about the same as the time to change in the first place.
David Wittenberg Brown University
{decvax, yale-comix, vax135, allegra}!brunix!dkw
dkw.brown@udel-relay (csnet or ARPA)