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Just how this came to be is a narrative that remains murky and – ironically – far from fixed. It's a story that offers insights into the sometimes unexpected pace of technological change, and one that's peopled by unsung inventors and obsessive tinkerers. It taps a fervent debate that most of us are oblivious to.
The earliest typewriters were cumbersome, moody machines but there was nevertheless an order to their keys that any English-speaking user could readily glean: they were arranged alphabetically. So why change this logical layout? Legend has it that Qwerty – known for the jabberwocky-style word formed by the first six letters of its top row – was dreamt up with the express purpose of slowing typists down. One character even lectures another about it in a Paulo Coelho novel.
In fact, the Qwerty layout was concocted to prevent keys from jamming – or at least, that's what most experts have tended to believe. The letters on a typewriter are affixed to metal arms, which are activated by the keys; on early models, if a lever was activated before its neighbour had fully come back down to rest, they would jam, forcing the typist to stop. Enter Christopher Sholes. Born in small-town Pennsylvania in 1819, Sholes was many things, including newspaper editor and Wisconsin state senator. He was also one of a team of inventors credited with building the first commercially viable typewriter. Having already tried to build machines for typesetting and printing numbers, Sholes' adventures in type began in 1867, when he read an article in Scientific American describing the Pterotype, a prototype typewriter invented by one John Pratt. The article sounded the death knoll for that "laborious and unsatisfactory" instrument, the pen, soon to be set down in favour of "playing on the literary piano".
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Monday December 19 2016, @10:44AM
Dunno about autocorrect. Personally, I turn it off. With autocorrect, you pretty much always have to look, to see what it's going to do, because different autocorrect systems in different pieces of software do different things, and even the same one may be adaptive, meaning that its behavior changes over time. If I am touch-typing, I never have to look at the keyboard, and looking at the screen is optional. With autocorrect, I have to pause in my typing, and look at the screen to see what's about to happen. This is not a feature, except on my phone, where touch-typing isn't an option.
Voice input? I don't see this being used on any large scale. In a shared office, the last thing you want is everyone talking to their computers. The only people I know who use voice entry are either disabled in some way, or else they work alone, usually in a home-office.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Monday December 19 2016, @11:26AM
A lot of people in the legal profession dictate their letters, pass the recordings to a secretary who will then take the recording and make a letter out of it. If you could make a recording in your office, and press a button to have an AI turn that into a letter, it would be really useful.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Monday December 19 2016, @06:37PM
I'm assuming that you're talking about autocomplete, not autocorrect. Looking at the screen is a small price to pay when you can expand something like s.ae to self.assertEqual. If you still mistrust autocomplete, you can always use more explicit options like Emacs abbrevs, which allows you to explicitly define expansions, for example bc to because.
The net effect is that you end up typing at least double the number of characters per keystroke.
For voice input, one of the nice things is that you don't have to be in the office. Not as suitable for programming, admittedly, but for emails and documents (what most people seem to be doing most of the time) it works fine.
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