Brain of Dane

Friend, I come to you today with a proposition.  Apparently, there are all sorts of life changing things going on in my life, and I want to share one with you that could change yours.  Imagine yourself back in the era of typewriters, where hitting a key actually caused a metal stamp to fly out and hammer a piece of paper.  Those were the days in which “backspace” wasn’t even a dream in Bill Gates’ mind.  Have we come so far as to forget our origins?  I was so young back then, I hardly remember it.  However, I remember the smell of the machine.  It was metallic and oily. I remember trying to press five keys at a time, and only jamming the machine.  Therein lies the problem, and the proposition.

When the typewriter was first invented, the arms that held the letter stamps were not spring loaded.  The keyed letters would fall back into position using nothing but gravity.  That is to say, the mechanism that made the typwriter useful was slow.  The original inventor found that when he layed out the keyboard in alphabetical order, he would press certain keys too quickly and end up jamming everything up.  In order to fix this problem, he studied how words were formed, and rearranged the keyboard so that there were fewer errors.  This was long before anyone knew anything about typing, so he might be called the father of the keyboard.  The same QWERTY keyboard we use today is the one he devised so long ago.

Soon after pitching his ideas to Remington, the original typewriter was redesigned to have spring-loaded arms.  This made the letters snap back into place no longer jamming except when the fastest typists were goin’ to town.  Now that the typwriter was more capable, the inventor realized that the keyboard could be redesigned to be more efficient.  He attempted to show the people at Remington his new idea, but they turned him down for the fact that everyone was already using the QWERTY keyboard, and they didn’t want to be the ones to bring typists to a screeching halt, let alone change a perfectly good design.

At around the same time, another intellectual named Dvorak was designing his own efficient keyboard layout.  Dvorak’s design was based on the idea that your fingers should rarely have to leave home row.  Therefore, with the Dvorak Simplified Layout you can type more than 3,000 words without ever leaving the comfort of the home row.  As a matter of fact, the left side of the home row only contains vowels, while the right side only contains consonants.  This forces the typist to alternate hands more times per word, crunching out words at amazing speeds.  After perfecting his design he tried it out on some people who had never even touched a typewriter before.  These new typist learned the Dvorak Simplified Layout much faster than others learned the QWERTY layout.  Also, Dvorak tried his design on some people who were seasoned QWERTY enthusiasts, and after some painful reworking of fingers, they were much faster and more accurate than they were before.

Sadly, news never spread of the new Dvorak layout because people simply don’t like change.  Just imagine you touch-typists having to completely relearn all that you know about using a keyboard.  AHA!!!

I challeng you now to rewire your brain.  Become a child again, cover your keyboard, and figure out just what this Dvorak thing is all about.  That’s exactly what I intend to do.  I already have the home row down, and I am about to move beyond it to the more obsecure letters of the alphabet.

You don’t have the resources you say?

REJOICE, FOR I AM THE BEARER OF THE GOOD NEWS!  READ THE DVORAK ZINE AND REJOICE!

——–> http://www.dvzine.org/ <——-

Now, go forth and spread the good news.  Read the zine, give the zine away, do the tutorials, and become a better typist.