Frank and Ernest by Thaves for February 03, 2025

In the world of computers, we refer to the “dreaded finger-pointing syndrome”. Something goes wrong, but the end user doesn’t know what, and so contacts customer support for the software. They say it’s a hardware problem, so next contact is to the hardware vendor, who says it’s a network problem. But the network vendor says “No, it’s a software problem.” And round and round we go, nobody taking responsibility and the problem not getting fixed.

It’s been the same thing since the introduction of the Dvorak keyboard. The QWERTY one we’re all familiar with was invented in 1874 by Christopher Sholes, and he specifically made it hard to type common two-letter sequences quickly, because that would cause the physical typebars to jam. By 1936 that concern had faded, so August Dvorak invented a keyboard that had all the vowels on the left side of the home row and the most common consonants on the right side. Notably, the H was under the right index finger, immediately adjacent to the top-row C, home-row T, and bottom-row W, struck by the right middle finger. (When drumming your fingers, you roll from little finger to index finger, which made the CH, TH, and WH combos very easy.) Seldom-used letters like Q and Z were consigned to the outer reaches of the bottom row.

Dvorak was superior to Sholes in every ergonomic way, and people who learned to use it typically attained typing speeds 10 to 30% faster than the best they’d ever been able to achieve with the Sholes keyboard. But here we are, nearly a century later, and Dvorak still hasn’t caught on. Why not? It’s a variant of the dreaded finger-pointing syndrome. Manufacturers, customers (both individuals and businesses), and business schools are each waiting for one of the other ones to go first.

 (a little more to come)