Why QWERTY Still Reigns
This article from BBC News explores the origin of the QWERTY keyboard and why it continues to be the prevalent keyboard today. The history of QWERTY in the United States begins after the Civil War. Typewriters were the newly invented, and the industry sought standardization. QWERTY become standard because it solved a mechanical problem: limited the number of clashes between typebars. If a person was typing too fast, or pushing letters located next to each other in quick session, the bars that pressed the letter onto the page would hit each other. Christopher Sholes solved this problem by organizing the letters so that letter commonly found next to each other, such as ‘T’ and ‘H,’ had typebars on opposite sides of the typewriter. Allegedly, this slows down the typer, so they don’t break the machine. Some experts question that Sholes wanted to slow down the typer with the QWERTY keyboard, claiming that while it’s not ergonomical, ergonomics just wasn’t a consideration in the nineteenth century. Regardless, QWERTY was adopted by Remington, a famous typewriter and sewing machine maker, and it became the standard.
In the 1930s, August Dvorak introduced a new, ergonomically designed keyboard. His design promoted faster typing, more accuracy in getting the desired word and less typebar clashes. Despite all of it’s benefits, the Dvorak keyboard never replaced the QWERTY. Another arguably better keyboard style is the stenotype, which is used by stenographers in court. Stenotypes only have 22 keys and they represent syllables instead of letters, so they are capable of typing at the speed of speech. Why have these faster, arguably better keyboards not replaced QWERTY? This is especially interesting because in today’s world, there is no mechanical problem with using a different style of keyboard, as modern computers don’t have typebars that could clash. Looking at it from a networks perspective, we can model this situation as diffusion behavior in a network. The QWERTY keyboard is the industry standard, and originally everyone in the network is using it. Then, Dvorak introduces his better technology to the network, and he is the first adopter. The better technology has the benefit of being the better technology, but it lacks the direct benefit of QWERTY, namely that QWERTY is the standard, so everyone in the network knows how to use it and there is a lot of support for it. Dvorak’s neighbors will only adopt his keyboard if the payoff to them is higher for switching. Applying a mathematical model to this, like in chapter 19, can show that there is a threshold for adoption of the new technology. Because no one in the industry decided to make the switch to the new keyboard, we can see there must be a high threshold for adoption of the technology. Thus, as the old saying goes, there is strength in numbers, and the large cluster of the network that used QWERTY made it so the older technology would continue to be the most prominent. By using a networks lens to examine this case, we can find a plausible explanation to why the QWERTY keyboard still reigns.