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Notes -
Okay, this is one I’ll back up. I thought it was commonly accepted.
The QWERTY design was intended to minimize typewriter jams. Hitting two adjacent keys too fast tended to jam, because each letter swung a tiny arm. So the design placed common consonant pairs fair apart, maximizing clearance.
In grade school, this was glossed as “intentionally arranged to slow the user down.” I don’t think this is accurate. But there are definitely some features that come straight from the 1870s. Without tiny arms to jam, they’re pure, “pointless” technical debt.
On the other hand, the evidence for any particular replacement isn’t very good. A skilled typist works around the nonsense just fine. So the “inefficiency” is minimal at best. It certainly doesn’t favor nerds! Still, we could in theory benefit more from a different standard.
It isn't efficient (although as you say, it's not less efficient than most other keyboard layouts we've tried) and if he'd just said that I wouldn't have said anything. But calling it pointless is just wrong - there was a point to its design, and the point to it now is that all of the world's fastest typists are fluent in it and converting them would be a monumental task.
That said, we could definitely do better if we could start over. There was a keyboard design for thumbsticks I used to have on the psp that I reached 68wpm on after only a month's usage for example.
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