August Dvorak: What could have been…
This article from BBC News explores the origin of the QWERTY keyboard and why it became the standard keyboard layout in America. The QWERTY keyboard layout was conceived in the United States after the Civil War with the rise of typewriters. Initially, typewriters were produced by a variety of manufacturers, each using a different keyboard layout. QWERTY became standard because it solved a mechanical problem—it 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 for typewriters in America.
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.
When the QWERTY keyboard became the industry standard in 1873, most typewriter manufacturers adopted it immediately, although some still tried to improve it. Thus, if we model this as a network, every manufacturer has adopted the QWERTY keyboard. When Dvorak introduced his better technology to the network, however, he became the first adopter. Dvorak’s model was undoubtedly the better keyboard, but no other manufacturers adopted it. In other words, we have a technology A (QWERTY), which is standard across the network, and a technology B (Dvorak), which has only been adopted by Dvorak himself. In this case, Dvorak’s neighbors will only adopt his keyboard, technology B, if their payoff for switching is greater than it is for staying. 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. That is, since the QWERTY layout had already been established as the industry standard and because consumers had grown so accustomed to it, the threshold for switching to Dvorak’s layout was so much higher. Essentially, consumers decided that the payoff of switching to a better, but completely new, keyboard layout was smaller than the payoff of sticking with the QWERTY layout. Thus, as the old saying goes, there is strength in numbers, and the large cluster of the network that used QWERTY was so dense that it made switching to Dvorak’s layout almost impossible from the onset. By using a networks lens to examine this case, we can find a plausible explanation to why the QWERTY keyboard still reigns.
Source: bbc.com/news/technology-10925456