- 5 ay önce
Why The QWERTY Keyboard Actually Sucks
Kategori
🤖
TeknolojiDöküm
00:00Your keyboard sucks! Well, your keyboard probably sucks. Does it look like this? Yeah, it sucks.
00:06Have you ever wondered why the letters on your keyboard are in the order that they're in?
00:09Probably because it's efficient for typing or something, right? Wrong! This layout is actually
00:14one of the least efficient ways of distributing characters for typing! So where, then, did the
00:18QWERTY layout come from? And why does nearly every keyboard on Earth use it? Well, first I should
00:23explain why QWERTY is bad, and for that, there are a lot of reasons. In general, typing is most
00:28efficient when you're alternating hands as much as possible between letters. Apricot, for example,
00:32is one of the easiest seven-letter words to type on a keyboard. While you type one letter with your
00:36right hand, you have time to move your left hand into position to type the next letter. But, for most
00:41words on a QWERTY keyboard, this actually doesn't happen as often as it should. Many common words,
00:46like was and were, are meant to be typed entirely with your left hand while your right hand does
00:50nothing. Common letters are a problem, too. While the home row is the quickest row to access, some of
00:56the most common letters are found above and below it, meaning you only stay on the home row for about
01:0132% of strokes and often have to jump over it to get between letters. I won't get into everything here,
01:06but the point is that it's bad. And it's weird that it's bad, because it's everywhere. So, if it wasn't
01:12designed for efficiency, what was it designed for? To answer this question, we've gotta hop in our time
01:17machine. We'll take a quick pit stop in 1933 to kill Hitler, and then we'll make a beeline for the 1840s to
01:22look at some dusty old keyboards. The earliest examples of what you might call a keyboard looked
01:27like this, much closer to a piano keyboard with the letters arranged alphabetically. This fairly
01:32niche invention was designed to simplify the sending and receiving of telegrams, but, due to some technical
01:37constraints, could only transmit about 40 words per minute. The letters could have been rearranged for
01:42more efficient typing, but there was really no point. 40 words per minute is just… not that fast. And besides,
01:49there wasn't really anything happening in the 1840s that was worth typing quickly about anyway.
01:53Now, when typewriters first hit the scene, they originally adopted this same design. Two rows
01:58like a piano, arranged alphabetically. But unlike its higher-tech predecessor, this typewriter could
02:03theoretically transmit words as fast as the user could type, which presented its designers with a
02:08question. What's the most efficient layout of the Roman alphabet? The first major revision of the
02:13keyboard saw them grouping all the vowels together at the top, while reversing the order of the second half of
02:18the consonants. This design was then sold to the arms manufacturer Remington, who was looking to
02:22get into a new business since the American Civil War had just wrapped up, and they figured that that
02:26was probably the last time anyone would need guns. Remington brought the typewriter to the mass market
02:31with a few additional revisions, introducing the world to the concept of a keyboard with this. The arrangement
02:37of keys here is almost identical to the modern QWERTY keyboard, except for the positions of M, X, and C,
02:42and a few missing keys, including, bizarrely, 1 and 0, which was considered unnecessary. I'm not exactly
02:49sure what people thought when they saw a keyboard for the first time and it looked like this because,
02:52as far as I can tell, Remington never bothered to explain why the letters are where they are.
02:57They were just like, this is what a keyboard is, have fun! In the ensuing century and a half,
03:01people developed a bunch of different theories about why, exactly, Remington put the alphabet in a
03:06blender. The most popular theory was that it was designed to deliberately slow typists down by
03:10separating common letter pairs like H-E, A-N, or R-O. The thinking was that typing pairs too quickly
03:17might jam the older typewriters, and that an inefficient layout might prevent that from happening.
03:21The strongest aspect of this theory is that it makes for a really good title on R slash Today I
03:26Learned, and the only problem with this theory is that it doesn't make any sense at all. While some
03:30letter pairs are far apart, many aren't. The most common English bigram, T and H, is right next to
03:36each other. So are E and R. So are S and E. If the whole point of this layout was to separate common
03:42letter pairs, this would be a pretty stupid way of doing it. It wasn't until 2011 that this paper
03:48out of Kyoto University cracked the code, and that code was Morse code. You see, the QWERTY layout
03:53was meant to be efficient, but efficient for a very specific purpose. While these days the primary use
03:59for a typewriter is as a substitute for having a personality in college, they were originally used
04:03for transcribing telegrams. And unless you received your telegram with someone with this
04:07aforementioned doohickey, the message would have been received at the telegraph office in the form
04:11of Morse code—audible dots and dashes—that would then be transcribed in real-time to readable text.
04:17The operators at these telegraph offices needed to be able to type quickly and accurately,
04:21without confusing one set of beeps for another. In American Morse, which is slightly different from
04:25modern Morse code, there are a lot of letters—or a combination of letters—that can be hard to
04:29distinguish from one another. Z, for example, could easily be confused for SE, so when operators
04:35received a Z, they would often wait to type it until they received a few more letters. That way,
04:40they could know for sure if it was a Z or an SE. At that point, though, they were already behind,
04:45so if they had their hand hovering over the Z and it turned out to be an SE, they didn't want to have
04:49to move their hand all the way across the keyboard to find those other letters. It was important they
04:54were close by for a quick correction. And lo and behold, S and E are right next to Z on the keyboard
05:00right in front of you. Of course, these Morse code pairings don't account for the entirety of
05:05QWERTY's layout. You can see traces of a bunch of other random things in there, like needing to keep
05:09the I and O near the 9 key because the keyboard originally didn't have a 1 or a 0, putting the Y
05:14near the center of the keyboard because the guy who patented the typewriter demanded that it be there
05:18for some reason, grouping vowels near the top because that's where they got stuck originally, and even some
05:23sections that remain alphabetical from the keyboard's very earliest origins. In short, QWERTY is a messy
05:28compromise between half a dozen things that haven't mattered since the literal invention of Idaho.
05:33So, now that I've convinced you that your keyboard sucks, and it sucks for no reason,
05:37you're probably wondering if there's something better. Well, there is, and it's this, the Dvorak
05:42keyboard. This layout was developed about 100 years ago to solve this exact problem, optimizing entirely
05:48for a right-handed person typing in English. Dvorak grouped all the vowels on the left side of the
05:53keyboard, with the most common consonants on the right, increasing the rate at which you alternate
05:58hands when typing a single word. On top of this, the most common letters and bigrams can be typed
06:02entirely on the home row, meaning that 70% of all typing is done without ever moving your hands,
06:08and by relegating the least common letters to the bottom row, only 8% of strokes require reaching down.
06:14Real typing nerds who have probably already typed a thousand words about why I'm stupid since I started this
06:18sentence, would probably point out that there's a modern version of this layout called the Colmac,
06:22which uses these same principles but slightly more efficiently, keeping 74% of all strokes to the
06:27home row instead of Vorak's pitiful 70. Does that mean you should throw out your keyboard and restart
06:32your type-to-learn journey on Colmac? I mean, probably not. It would take you years to eke out even a
06:36slight improvement. If there's any improvement at all, then you'll probably never find a keyboard.
06:40Certainly not a laptop that uses anything other than QWERTY, unless you want to go down the rabbit
06:43hole of building your own keyboards, and as someone with 35 keyboards and zero money, trust me,
06:47you don't want to go down that rabbit hole. So suck it up, use your sucky keyboard like the rest
06:52of us, and just do it with the smug self-assuredness that it's history's fault that you didn't finish
06:57that paper faster. Now, if you're hearing these words that I'm speaking right now, congratulations!
07:02You just sat through a 7-minute video explaining why the Q key is in the wrong place on your keyboard.
07:07If you've made it this far, it's probably because you get genuine satisfaction from learning new things,
07:11and if that's the case, I think you'll love our sponsor, Brilliant. Brilliant is my go-to
07:16resource for learning any new math or science concept that I want to get my brain around.
07:20They have thousands of lessons on everything from data science to calculus to programming in Python.
07:25Right now, I'm working my way through their course on large language models, and I love how intuitive
07:30and interactive each lesson is. I never have to read big chunks of text or study some problem over
07:36and over again. Everything is simple and fun, and best of all, I can learn for just a few minutes at a
07:41time. I'll do a lesson on the bus or when I'm doing my laundry, and then I can easily just pick
07:46up from where I was the next time I have a few spare minutes. It's the perfect way to get a little bit
07:50smarter every day, and if that sounds like a goal of yours, I can't recommend Brilliant enough.
07:55To try everything Brilliant has to offer, free for a full 30 days, visit Brilliant.org slash HAI or click
08:01on the link in the description. Better yet, you'll get 20% off Brilliant's annual premium subscription,
08:06and you'll be supporting this channel too.
İlk yorumu siz yapın