[masraum]

Originally Posted by RWebb

a heavy input load may induce someone to re-train themselves to use the Devorak (sp) keyboard - is that in your pic masrum??

the Qwerty ones were designed for mech. typewriters to prevent users from typing too fast for the machine

I used to love the std. Qwerty layout mech. keyboards but switched to Apple & now use one of their muchy wireless ones with a numeric keypad

Yes, the image in my post in Dvorak. I swapped many years ago. It made sense to me, and I had some spare time. The theory is that you end up typing twice as frequently on the home row(~70% vs ~35%). It also alternates between the hands more frequently, and many of the common two letter dipthongs are typed in such a way that they start toward the outside and move towards the inside (pinky-->thumb) which is natural (think of strumming your fingers on a table). It took a while to get used to it and get back up to speed.

I too have read the story about the typewriter keyboard being set to the QWERTY layout to slow folks down when typewriters were mechanical and still somewhat immature and therefore unable to key up with fast typists without jamming. I think I've also read that is incorrect. I do know that QWERTY is much like VHS or Bluray. There were originally a bunch of layouts, and QWERTY won the race.