Don Burke
Contributor
I interpret it to mean that keeping the typebars likely to be used sequentially on different parts of the "circle" prevented jams. Note that one of the features of the Dvorak keyboard is that it largely alternates hands.Woland:I think that he's saying that by slowing characters-per-second typed down, and not getting the typewriter jammed, that you're actually speeding up the entire process of typing a document / documents.
I think you're both saying the same thing...kinda.
Woland
Believing that Shole intentionally slowed down the keystrokes would require me to believe that he intentionally discarded a faster key arangement.
That involves two assumptions:
1. That there was a faster key arangement at the time.
Since the Dvorak keyboard was not developed until much later and at a considerable expenditure of effort, could Shole's initial keyboard have been faster than Dvorak's? I think not.
The only tests I have reporting higher speeds for the Dvorak are anectdotal at best and also report that many found the speed gain to not be worth the effort. There is the GSA study (which I have _not_ found independent documentation of) that reported no significant speed gain.
What could Shole's initial arangement possibly be and how could it have been faster than QWERTY if Dvorak's design is having so much trouble being proven faster?
2. That Shole knew about it.
On a new machine, how much study could they have done on various keyboards? There would be no population of expert typists to draw from. There were the pressures of getting it to market.
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I find it far more likely that Shole was just trying to make his machine work and the keyboard layout he picked for mechanical reasons happened to be pretty fast. In fact, fast enough that a marginally faster keyboard (developed later) has been largely ignored as "not worth the trouble". The concept that he intentionally slowed down keystroke speed does not fit the evidence.