Consider The QWERTY keyboard. It was primarily invented so flamboyant typewriter sales people can type TYPEWRITER in one motion demonstrations to wow potential customers. Read more here https://qr.ae/TW8Np4 In this lost 1943 film we can see a history of typewriters...pic.twitter.com/xVn4M2UkGq
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Replying to @BrianRoemmele
I thought this was an optimal layout to stop bars clashing on most commonly typed words?
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Replying to @richmorgans
Richard, thanks for asking “er” + “re” are the most used word parings in English. They are on the same bar. I cover that in the
@Quora posting listed.1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
They’re not on the same bar. They’re not even on two adjacent bars, at risk of clashing. E and R were two bars apart on the original typewriter. This is a common misconception; please see Neil Kay’s papers or e.g. http://widespacer.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-hidden-secrets-of-qwerty.html …, which specifically mentions this.
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Marcin, thank you. I have read this paper. However this is not what was in the first patents or in any of the Remington patents. Nor was this how the first QWERTY typewriters built. The big misconception is the reason the keyboard was invented simply was not mechanical.
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“Nor was this how the first QWERTY typewriters built.” This is simply not accurate – see Neil Kay’s papers that analyzed and proved this mathematically. Your Quora answer offers very limited citations on the relevant portions.
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Marcin, thank you. I have seen Neil’s work and it is wonderful. The reality is the bigram frequency, of which Sholes was aware of was rather high on many key combinations like re and er in which there is lock up. I have worked on Remington models where e & r are on the same bars.
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Replying to @BrianRoemmele @mwichary and
Marcin, if you study the Sholes patent it is clear that the e & r were on the same bar and in addition the layout was not specified to be a method to stop key lock ups. And this would have been an embodiment presented even in the late 1800s.
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Marcin, more pertinently data on touch typing. In the early years typists simply were not fast enough to cause many of the theoretical key pair lock ups that many postulate is the reason for QWERTY. It was not until Mo. 2 when early typing methods arrived, primarily through YWCA.pic.twitter.com/D339uGxkmC
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