QWERTY keyboard is not meant for computers

The typewriter was invented in 1866 by Carlos Glidden, Samuel Soulé, and Christopher Latham Sholes. The alphabetical layout of the keys was not a good one; the type bars that struck the paper jammed often. So Christopher came up with a fix for this by placing the type bars for letters of common digraphs, two-letter sequences, as far from each other as possible. The end result was the awkward and confusing QWERTY keyboard layout (named for the first six letters on the top row), which appeared on the first commercially produced typewriter in 1873. When touch-typing became popular in the 1880s, QWERTY was the norm for many keyboards. Although newer keyboards did not jam as easily, it remained the most popular layout and other layouts gradually fell out of use. The standard "QWERTY" keyboard was not designed with ease of typing in mind and don't really suits modern day computers.

The Dvorak keyboard layout was created and patented in 1936 by Dr. August Dvorak, a professor at the University of Washington, and William L. Dealey, his brother-in-law. It was the result of much effort studying typing behavior and letter frequency. Unbelievably, the layout actually makes typing easier, faster, and more efficient! The key to its success is the arrangement of the letters.

Some of the world's fastest typists are using Dvorak. A woman named Barbara Blackburn failed her high school typing course, which, of course, taught QWERTY. Then she found out about the Dvorak keyboard and after that she can type at a rate of 170 WPM and once peaked at 212 WPM, and listed for a decade as the world's fastest typist in the Guinness Book of Records! Indeed, most typists who switch from QWERTY to Dvorak easily match their old speed, and usually surpass it. Some have seen a 200-300% increase in their speed.

Unlike the QWERTY keyboard, the Dvorak keyboard includes the most common letters on the home row (the row of keys your hands rest on when you are touch-typing). The next most common letters are on the top row, and the least-used letters are on the bottom row. 60-70% of the typing is done on the home row of Dvorak, compared with 30-35% on QWERTY's home row. On Dvorak, you can type thousands of words on the home row (aoeuidhtns) but limited on QWERTY keyboard (asdfghjkl;)

It has also been proven that the Dvorak keyboard is easier to learn than QWERTY, accuracy will increase noticeably. It has been shown in studies that while a QWERTY typist's accuracy stops increasing, a Dvorak's typist's accuracy will continue to improve. More importantly, many people switch to Dvorak because it's more comfortable. The Dvorak layout was carefully adapted to fit the English language. Dvorak may actually decrease the risk of carpal-tunnel syndrome and other forms of repetitive-stress injury (RSI). You can type longer on Dvorak without making your fingers sore. In fact, most RSI sufferers no longer feel pain in their fingers after switching to Dvorak.

The fact that we still uses the QWERTY keyboards is because most people who are familiar with QWERTY do not want to make any changes. It's also because most manufacturer don't manufacture DVORAK keyboards because there's simply not enough demand for it. Typing training in schools and secretarial colleges is almost always done on the QWERTY layout both because it conforms with the expectation of industry and, ironically, because it is the layout with which most teachers or trainers are already familiar.

Source : www.theworldofstuff.com
Source : Fastest typist

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