Ever wonder about stuff?

I’ve always been curious about the qwerty keyboard. I kept on thinking about who the hell would think of putting the letters of the english alphabet in such an order and why that person would do so. What exactly did that person have in mind? I needed answers so I brought my hands together, cleared my mind, and asked an entity whose knowledge would provide me with insight; I typed “qwerty keyboard” into the Google search engine. Almighty Google led me to a repository of reliable information, Wikipedia from which I asked the same query.

From what I read and understood from Wikipedia, the makers of the qwerty keyboard didn’t have ergonomics, general comfort, and practical placement of keys in mind, basically everything I thought they had in mind. Apparently, early typewriters had a nasty habit of having jammed keys. The qwerty layout did the trick, and so did better typewriter designs that came years later. I guess the selling point of the qwerty layout was that the typewriter makers found it cute that you could spell “typewriter” using only one string of keys, which is pretty nifty and cute. Anyway since qwerty was the first to be mass-produced, it enjoyed the privelege of being used by almost everybody.

Decades later, some people decided they didn’t like the qwerty layout. They said it wasn’t the most practical of layouts. Qwerty preferred the right hand over the left since most of the commonly used letters were on the side of the left hand. Those people wanted to start a revolution and they introduced the dvorak keyboard layout. They said it provides better comfort than the qwerty, that it was more practical since the most frequently used letters were placed on the home line (the asdf-jkl; line in the qwerty layout), and it wouldn’t stress your hands that much. A grand idea really.

Too bad it didn’t revolutionize the world; almost all of us are still using qwerty, heck I use qwerty, everybody in the world is stuck with qwerty. But the dvorak cause isn’t totally lost since one can toggle the languages part of the computer to recognize the dvorak layout. Learning to type with the dvorak layout seems like a nice thing to do on days of mind-numbing boredom; that also goes for learning lojban.

I guess I’ll end this with a (pretentious) rhetorical question (am I using that right?) followed by a little exposition (am I using that right?). Isn’t it sad that things could be (theoretically) better by changing a few things we’d rather not since we’re already used to the old thing? I mean we can probably end a few keyboard-related injuries by learning a new layout and stuff. We’d probably type faster and maybe blog better (or worse). Anyway, I’m running out of ideas, and I’ve wasted enough of your time.

(I have got to work on how to end stuff.)