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Untangling the myths and mysteries of Dvorak and QWERTY (2023)
Untangling the myths and mysteries of Dvorak and QWERTY
Watching someone type on it felt painful: fingers flailed wildly all over the place, common letters far away from the home row necessitated more travel, and there were long stretches of one hand doing all the work while the other sat idle. In Typewriting Behavior, you will find long tables of finger loads and word frequencies – but also gestalt psychology, hypnosis, Pavlov, “Doctor Freud of Vienna,” and chapters titled “The typist’s social heritage” and “The essential compromise between talking and doing.” In 1996, one of them started with, “It took me 103 seconds to write this sentence.” Casey Johnston, then a writer for the tech site Ars Technica, wrote a surprisingly gripping tale in 2014, involving moments like, “Typing numbers is now my favorite activity because everything is in the same place” and:
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