[masraum]

The story is that back when the typewriter was first invented, folks were typing so fast that they jammed the mechanism. Because of that some typewriter companies scrambled the letters on the keyboard to make folks type slower to eliminate jams. When the mechanical aspects of typewriter design were fixed, the typewriter companies tried to put the keys back, but everyone was used to the new arrangement. So, the querty layout was designed specifically to make you type more slowly.

Dvorak studied letter frequencies and the physiology of people's hands and created a layout to adhere to these principles:

* Letters should be typed by alternating between hands.
* For maximum speed and efficiency, the most common letters and digraphs should be the easiest to type. This means that they should be on the home row, which is where the fingers rest, and under the strongest fingers.
* The least common letters should be on the bottom row, which is the hardest row to reach.
* The right hand should do more of the typing, because most people are right-handed.
* Digraphs should not be typed with adjacent fingers.
* Stroking should generally move from the edges of the board to the middle. An observation of this principle is that, for many people, when tapping fingers on a table, it is easier going from little finger to index than vice versa. This motion on a keyboard is called inboard stroke flow.[3]

Notable users

* Barbara Blackburn, world typing speed record holder[35]
* Bram Cohen, inventor of BitTorrent[36]
* Matt Mullenweg, lead developer of WordPress[37]
* Terry Goodkind, author of The Sword of Truth[38]
* Piers Anthony, author of the Xanth novels, often wrote in the 1980s author's notes in the books about how his Dvorak use prevented him from converting to a word processor.[39] This was made even more difficult because he uses an alternate Dvorak layout (swapping the hyphen and apostrophe keys — the apostrophe key on his keyboard is where the hyphen key is on a standard US keyboard (and vice-versa)).
* Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft[40]
* Steve Wozniak, co-founder Apple Computer[41]
* Shawn Betts, author of Ratpoison and Stumpwm window managers.
* Alexander Stram, Co-founder of Silenceisdefeat.org[42]
* Joshua Baer, founder of SKYLIST and OtherInbox[43]
* Mike Dwyer, Co-Programmer of popular computer Game "Shipwreck"[44]
* Matt Margolis, conservative author[45] and blogger[46]