Biography of the keyboard

But even from the ardent fans of Underwood, you will not achieve a declaration of love for the layout of the keyboard, on which they put on days long. The fact that the writers themselves do not honors the decisive characteristics of their working tool is very significant. Over the past years, changes have occurred in almost everything related to transferring the text from the author’s head to the information carrier.

Only the layout of the keyboard remained unchanged, although it received some development. In all devices used in the English -speaking world, a single system is used - almost as unshakable as the alphabet itself: Qwerty the first six letters of the upper row of the keyboard, which correspond to Yzuken in the main Russian -language layout - approx. The history of the appearance of this layout is foggy and, oddly enough, contradictory.

It allows you to take a fresh look at the course of technological progress and is replete with the names of undeservedly forgotten inventors and ahead of their time of thinkers. This is the story of a fierce dispute, which for most of us has left unnoticed. The first models of writing machines were bulky and capricious devices, but the layout of their keyboards was distinguished by the order familiar to any English -speaking user: the keys were located in alphabet.

In one of Paolo Coelho’s novels, it is on this version that the dialogue is built between the two characters. Follow your hands, in reality, this layout was invented in order to prevent the jamming of keys on the typewriters - at least most experts adhere to this version. The letters that leave prints on paper are connected to metal levers that are driven by pressing the corresponding keys.

In the early models of writing machines, the activation of the lever before the neighboring one completely returned to its original position led to jamming, and the person gaining text had to interrupt the work. He patented her in the year and then sold the company Remington here and intervened Christopher Showles, an inventor who was born in the year in a small town in the American state of Pennsylvania.

During his life, Showles tried a lot of classes, including working as a newspaper editor and held the post of Senator Visconsin. In addition, he was part of a group of inventors who are considered developers of the first commercially successful writing machine.

In the year, Showles, who had already made an attempt to design a machine for recruiting and printing numbers, read an article in the journal Scientific American, describing a “pterotype” - a prototype of a typewriter invented by a certain John Pratt. The article predicted an imminent death by a “tedious and ineffective” letter by hand - it was supposed to irrevocably ousting the “play on the literary piano”.

Carried away by this idea, Showles in cooperation with the printer Samuel Willard Soul began to develop a machine whose keyboard really consisted of two rows of black and white keys, like a piano. In subsequent years, several more people connected to the project, including lawyer Carlos Glidden, the time of the master of Matthias Schwalbach and businessman James Denzmore who invested his last dollars in the enterprise.

Unfortunately, it was not particularly useful there, since there were no numbers necessary for the transcribing of telegraph messages transmitted by the ABC of Morses on the keyboard. Showles later added numbers, but what was to do with jamming keys? Be that as it may, the genius of the system was to arrange the letters included in the most common two -letter combinations of the so -called diggas, as far away from each other.

However, the layout usual has taken root only after the patent for the show of Showles was acquired by the company E Remington and Sons in the year; Before that, the point was now located at the place where the letter R is now located. For most of us, the speed of typing is not so important, but in the environment of professionals it is very highly valued. One of these professionals was a professor at the University of Washington August Dvorak, who was born in the year in Minnesota and was a distant relative of the Czech composer Antonin Dvorzhak.

He first became interested in this topic, when he advised a student who gained a dissertation on a typewriter about typos. In addition, the letters necessary for the recruitment of such common words as "was" and "was" "were" and "were" are located under the left hand. In the year, the courtyard with Shurin patented the keyboard, which the professor gave his name. Dvorak claimed that the text, for the recruitment of which the fingers of the drivers on average, have to be made above the QWERTY keyboard of 32 km, with its system will require movements that fit only one and a half kilometers.

According to the inventor, the courtyard keyboard had indisputable advantages in ergonomics, and also allowed to prevent many common typos. Nowadays, typos do not represent such a big problem, because you can use the Delete key.But modern fans of the courtyard system emphasize that, among other things, it helps to avoid chronic tendon stretching. Subsequently, this statement was refuted, but if you look closely, the QWERTY layout really does not differ in meaning.

Lays for the digital eyelid, another hypothesis explaining the occurrence of QWERTY layout, states that all the letters necessary for the recruitment of the word "typewriter" is grouped in it in the upper row. This was allegedly done so that the sellers could quickly gain the name of the device, which would delight potential buyers. However, in the year, employees of Kyoto University Koichi Yasuok and Motoko Yasuoka noted in their work that during the time of Showles there were still no professional engineers who could sell the invention.

Scientists put forward their own assumption: in the layout of the QWERTY, the letters of the alphabet are located for the maximum convenience of telegraphists, which became the first customers of Showles. The laptop on which I write this article - and, most likely, yours, too, has a built -in function that almost no one ever uses: you can switch the keyboard layout from QWERTY to another system.

Of course, before I learn to print blindly on a new layout, I will have to rename the keys. But the bottom line is that to switch to the keyboard of the courtyard, you do not have to change something in the computer itself. The blind print training occurs gradually, along the way - we look for letters until the fingers themselves begin to fly along the keyboard periodically returning to the Delete key.

If we were seriously taught the blind seal, we would know that we can easily learn a new system, which may be better for the language or devices we use, on which we gain the text. But now, when we so often use a large finger for typing with a thumb, there are many alternative systems. So, for example, there is a Hero keyboard that looks like a rare telephone disk. Touchone, according to developers, is the world's first keyboard, designed specifically for smart watches: the alphabet letters fit in eight buttons, and the set requires a combination of four gestures.

Finally, there are no letters in the Popkey keyboard: animated images are used in it. All these new systems have one advantage - the speed of the set. But is this speed really important in reality? For writers, most likely, there is no; It is enough to recall how Trumen Kapota once answered Jack Kerouac: "He does not write, he is printing." What about the rest? Considering that now many situations of the set of text ends with its instant publication, perhaps we should be grateful for any circumstances that slow down this process and give us time to think before postponings on social networks.