The fact that he did that means he was very self motivated to do things he enjoyed. Anyone that is that self motivated and put that towards things they enjoy and are things that can be made a career will all ways go far.
What a bloody waste when speech recognition approaches 98%! Bloody pain to go back and correct, though, so in _that_ sense my point becomes moot. So on reflection, n.m. 😆
That's how I taught myself to type, learned which fingers go to which keys and typed out a book I was reading at the time (it was a long English winter in the early nineties...). I do remember being fascinated with the mechanics and feeling of the typewriter.
I taught myself to touch-type on a manual typewriter (from Woolworths) using a '10-day course', and I agree entirely with Stephen: it's a glorious thing to do. Once you get the speed, the process of writing is exhilarating. You feel so INVOLVED. When I moved on to an electric typewriter/ word-processor - which had a floppy-disc for storage and an on-board memory capable of holding something like 100 pages of plain text (whee!), I missed the manual carriage returns and it took me a while to soften my touch, but the speed was great and I found I could type at fast dictation speed. Writing on a computer keyboard is nice and quiet, but I do most of my internet stuff (like this) on a 10" tablet with a virtual keyboard, pecking away with one finger at a screen... I really don't enjoy it much.
Not sure who the inventor(s) were at the moment, but originally the keys were in alphabetical order. There are many other keyboard arrangements, including the Dvorak layout which is for requiring the least movement of the fingers, thus reducing hand cramps, etc.
I loved my first type-writer, that I got a few years before my first computer. It was as if my brain was primed for a computer...but had to settle with a typewriter before I ever saw a computer.
Alan was half right. They created QWERTY because fast typists were jamming the machines in other configurations due to common letters being near each other. QWERTY was intended to fix jamming but also slowed many typists down due to the new arrangement of keys.
I can see your argument, but it wasn't the reason to introduce the keyboard. But if the question would have been, what was the effect of the introduction of the QWERTY keayboards, you would be right. Having said that, I see your point, and half agree on it, that is why I would say that Alan was 1/4 right :D
The story I was told was that in certain businesses, typists were paid by the word and if they typed too fast their bosses had to pay them a lot more. QI makes me doubt everything I have been told.
No, no, nonsense, my lord, surely Alan was one-tenths correct in his assessment of the arrangement of *keys*. (Posh upper-English voice with croaky undertone sketch char.)
I learned to type on an IBM Selectric in high school during the Summer. However I also took at the same time computer programming where we used teletypes. (For people under 40 teletype were electric tyepewriters hooked up to computers by phone lines. They could type at the blistering speed of 110 chatacters per minute. I couldn't type that fast but that was their top speed.) Because they were electromechanical they required much more force to operate. When you pushed down a key you had to really push it down. You were mechanically locked out from pushing down two keys at once. Both the Selelctric and the teletype had the QWERTY keyboard.
They missed mentioning that they also took the opportunity to get a bit of marketing in. You can type the word "typewriter" without leaving the QWERTY row.
surely E R T S and D are quite commonly used together but those letters are right beside each other, am I missing something because it doesn't make sense to me that the qwerty configuration doesn't have common combinations together
I'm no touch typist, but if you've got common pairings close to each other, aren't you supposed to hit both keys with the same finger, forcing you to hit the first, lift move and then hit the second key. This instead of say hitting both effectively at the same time using say fingers from both hands?
Hunter Thompson used to type out chapters of The Great Gatsby each day and when he finished, he'd toss it all out and start again, it got his motor running he said. Other writers have used Hemingway's work and Falkner's as well. It's a tried and true method of starting your mind connecting with the process. Try it.
the spaced-ness of frequently used letters is still good today. You can type much faster if the keys that you're going to use more often are spaced out. Some languages that i have to use an american keyboard for have lots of Other letters stuck together all the time and it makes it harder, or at least slower, for the same finger to hit the adjacent keys. "Women" i can type faster than i can blink, but "Mujeres" takes forever because my index finger is engaged for the first 3 letters.
I always thought that the layout was to speed up typing, making it easier to access the keys for the English language using both hands. Other languages can have a different layout of keys. But also I know it had something to do with the mechanical typewriter and the smooth flow of the letters to avoid jamming. But certainly was told before that it was to speed up.
I´ve heard that the quickest keyboard design is one with all vowels in the middle since you use those most often and there you can hit them the quickest. But everybody who is used to the QWERTY keyboard would have to to relearn typing if they´d introduce that.
I still think qwerty was designed to make to type slower. You'd _write_ faster but that's because the gain in speed from the keys not getting stuck was greater than the loss in typing speed. The metal arms with the stamps can still get stuck even if the keys are far away, since the stamps still need to hit the same spot on the paper. Also, the "faulty" explanation going around isn't just that qwerty was designed to slow typists down, but that qwerty was designed to slow typists down _so_ _that_ the keys wouldn't get stuck, enabling them to write faster.
It's not the main reason for the arrangement of the keys. The main reason is that more common letters are in the middle and the more rare ones are in the corners. E.g. you have the most used letters like EAR on the left and IOL on the right. Other common letters like TNC which form the middle. Around them you have rare letters, which are still common and in the corners you got QPMZ. On a German keyboard e.g. the Z and Y are switched. They are QWERTZ keyboards, because the Z is more common than the Y. It has to do with what Stephen mentions in the video about the mechanics, but it's not the main reason. Lots of common ones are close to each other, like E and R or O and I.
No, the most commonly used letters are off the home row. Have a look at a heatmap of keyboard use and you will see that the centre of the keyoard gets the least use.
Back when I started learning Elder Futhark Runes I decided to transcribe the novel 'Runemarks' by Joanne Harris into them as practice. I've only done about a dozen pages, but I want to continue when I have time.
So they weren't done that way to slow typists down, they were done that way to keep the keys from jamming? Why were the keys jamming? Maybe because typists were typing too fast?
Because jamming isn't a constant probability for all keys. Adjacent keys have a longer "danger window" where you have to wait before typing the second letter than farther apart keys do, because for adjacent keys the two levers' paths overlap for much of their traverse to the paper and back. Far apart keys only overlap for a short space at the tip of their trip. Far apart keys can be hit in succession faster without a jam.
Alan is right. So is Stephen. Two sides of the same coin. Qwerty slows typists down so that the keys don’t hit each other and jam, which speeds up their typing in the long run.
While that it is partially true that the layout of the QWERTY keyboard was designed to avoid key jams, one of the key reasons for the exact layout is due to a marketing ploy. Originally the period was in the place of the R, but was moved so that the top row contained all the letters to spell TYPEWRITER supposedly to show the efficiency of the layout.
And you can spell "ashgalad" using only the middle row of keys, that can't be a coincidence either! Oh wait, that word is bullshit... like that urban myth!
I missed a class , don’t even remember what the class actually was , for a month and when I turned up everyone was learning to use a typewriter. My first day coincided with everyone doing it blindfolded and the teacher told me just to do my best. Since I hadn’t a clue where any letters were it was gibberish. I never turned up to that lesson again. 30 years later I still can’t type.
I used to look at my olds watching this on t.v and thought to myself, "you guys are fucked". Here i am watching Qi on youtube. My daughter just gave me that same look i have my olds
An interesting fact - German keyboards are QWERTZ. They swap the "z" and the "y" because "y" is extremely rare in German and "z" is very common. I love it when they take the mick out of Stephen's quirks. Phil Jupitus does it even better. To be honest I think he secretly loves it too.
I love QI. This question about QWERTY is about English keyboards. I'm learning German and some letters are moved about. Probably other languages have their own versions. Not the problem it once was now we have computers!
Excluding the ones that have different characters most languages use qwerty, german and swiss use qwertz and french and belgian keyboards have an azerty layout.
This explains why T and H are so close to each other... And G and H right next to each other. And E and R. Two other letters which famously rarely occur next to each other. Yep. Checks out.
I suspect Stephen might’ve been aware of the short story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" by Borges (English translation published 1962), in which the fictional writer, Menard, attempts to go “beyond a mere "translation" of Don Quixote by immersing himself so thoroughly in the work as to be able to actually "re-create" it, line for line, in the original 17th-century Spanish. Thus, Pierre Menard is often used to raise questions and discussion about the nature of authorship, appropriation, and interpretation.” (Wikipedia). I can easily believe that reading this story could prompt Stephen to transcribe an entire Wodehouse novel line-for-line.
this doesn't make sense. The changes slowed typists down, because the most common letters (57.4%, I've counted) were placed into the left hand, which would be weaker for most typists. Putting the common letters into the left hand meant that the natural speed was slower, which meant that jams were less frequent and the overall speed was maintained, or even improved. Look at the layout for the left hand, the most common letters, E, T, A have their own fingers, they are surrounded by Q, Z, X, the least used letters of all. The layout for the right hand is totally different, there the common letters are scattered, which helps to slow the right hand down. The overall skew to the left hand also explains why, as more keys were added for punctuation, they were placed under the underused right hand. Think about how many times the word 'addressed' would turn up in business correspondence, the keys are all next to each other!
Now in the days of computers and word processors, you can actually buy a keyboard with the ABCDEF layout. It is said that it only takes about 30 minutes to get used to it and speeds up typing.
Hehe ...I started copying a novel as well (on the laptop). Because I sucked at typing. However I my reading speed used to be really fast and I just ended up annoying myself. I think I gave up after 25 pages.
E and R type hammers are not next to each other: they are separated by D and C between them. Remember the hammers sit in a line, not on 3 levels like the keys
Ooh I knew this one! It was mostly because of typewriters used by women working in factories, the jam's hurt production as it took time to fix them or they straight up broke, needing repair.
Fast typists were experiencing jamming of the type hammers on certain common key combinations. When you separate those combinations on the keyboard, the hand needs to travel slightly further, so the net effect, of course, is to make them fractionally slower to complete - just on those combinations. Smoother sure, but slower also, so the QI team were inaccurate.
Makes no difference. With mechanical keys the jamming occurred by the speed at which the second key follows the first. When the two keys virtually coincide in hitting the ribbon they can stick together. The idea in moving those combos apart was to delay (fractionally) the second key from following the first. So slowing is what's intended. Yes achieving smoothness - but through a time delay.
There's also a theory I just saw in a documentary that all of the letters of the word "TYPEWRITER" are in the top row above the home keys, so travelling salesmen could advertise how easy typing was to prospective buyers by simply typing "TYPEWRITER" along one line with a single finger.
@@gwishart Ah, no. Sholes, the guy who came up with QWERTY, also helped to develop the first typing machine called a typewriter - which had a QWERTY keyboard. This was in the 1870s. The very first machine called a typewriter had QWERTY keyboard. Perhaps the choice of name was influenced by the layout - but there were no QWERTY keyboards before the first "typewriter."
