You're almost right there, dom180. It was definitely to slow us down because each typewriter key was linked to a swinging arm with a hammer on the end which imprinted the letter on the paper. They were arranged in a sort of semi-circle like an orchestra. If two were seated close, they would get tangled as one hit and returned and the next one went up to hit and you then had to untangle them with your fingers. I don't think there's anyone old enough here to remember that but it happened all the time. I used to be in a typing pool. This was my life.
It slowed down your typing speed. We had to work out how long to delay. It seemed to us that the man who designed the order of the letters did it almost randomly and if he'd done it according to which letters don't follow each other in our language (a 'k' rarely follows an 'x'), we'd have all been quicker because we wouldn't have had to wait a certain length of time on some words (especially "the". Look how close the letters are on your keyboard).
I don't want to insult men but women would have designed the layout more practically. It's commendable to put Q and W together, but three vowels were next to each other on the top row as I remember. And g and h were together. It made us think men were stupid and it made us angry because we had to follow this stupid layout and we had no say.
We don't want to think men are stupid. Just let men make decisions men are good at making and leave the rest of it to us.
What do you think of the Dvorak keyboard layout?
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You're almost right there, dom180. It was definitely to slow us down because each typewriter key was linked to a swinging arm with a hammer on the end which imprinted the letter on the paper. They were arranged in a sort of semi-circle like an orchestra. If two were seated close, they would get tangled as one hit and returned and the next one went up to hit and you then had to untangle them with your fingers. I don't think there's anyone old enough here to remember that but it happened all the time. I used to be in a typing pool. This was my life.
It slowed down your typing speed. We had to work out how long to delay. It seemed to us that the man who designed the order of the letters did it almost randomly and if he'd done it according to which letters don't follow each other in our language (a 'k' rarely follows an 'x'), we'd have all been quicker because we wouldn't have had to wait a certain length of time on some words (especially "the". Look how close the letters are on your keyboard).
I don't want to insult men but women would have designed the layout more practically. It's commendable to put Q and W together, but three vowels were next to each other on the top row as I remember. And g and h were together. It made us think men were stupid and it made us angry because we had to follow this stupid layout and we had no say.
We don't want to think men are stupid. Just let men make decisions men are good at making and leave the rest of it to us.