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posted by on Sunday December 18 2016, @11:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the slow-news-day dept.

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".


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 19 2016, @05:13PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday December 19 2016, @05:13PM (#443206)

    emacs brands you as a member of a particular cult to start with...

    I suppose Autocad could make keybindings easier to transfer, say onto a USB stick, or, God forbid, "the Cloud," then you plug that into your colleague's machine and he can temporarily use your bindings. But, then, to make it really "multi-user-friencly" it would somehow need to identify who is driving the mouse/keyboard/tablet at the moment and use their bindings at that time (camera/facial recognition) - that would be a cool system, if it worked.

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  • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday December 19 2016, @08:14PM

    by tangomargarine (667) on Monday December 19 2016, @08:14PM (#443300)

    If closing and reopening all the necessary files is a big pain, and unbinding and rebinding everything in a running session to a different config doesn't work cleanly, yeah you sound kind of SOL :P

    Emacs is supposed to have a "desktop save" feature where you can close and reopen it and it still has all files open but I've never tried it myself. Presumably AutoCAD is slightly more complicated than plaintext files ;)

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    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 20 2016, @12:19AM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday December 20 2016, @12:19AM (#443452)

      The real problem with life is that it's not just emacs and Autocad, there are dozens of apps out there, and no cohesive system for user customization.

      Maybe someday, if we ever get a Linus for the Desktop.

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