It is considered the great rival of the traditional QWERTY keyboard. And yet, the Dvorak keyboard remains a huge rarity among many other technological oddities. All kinds of conspiracies have been floated about its lack of adoption, but the video you'll see below explores other, much more realistic reasons.
August Dvorak was born on May 5, 1894. For a better perspective, the Sholes keyboard, known much better as the QWERTY keyboard, had already been on the market for at least 16 years. The so-called Dvorak Simplified Keyboard was officially presented in 1932, and supposedly, Dvorak typists had become so good by then that they were prohibited from participating in official competitions. Some documents mention Dvorak as a bitter man, angry at the world. After all, he tried for decades to introduce his keyboard as the definitive replacement for QWERTY. But if it was truly better, why did he not succeed?
QWERTY vs Dvorak
We have read and heard truly terrible things about QWERTY. Dvorak himself described it as “destructive”. It was also claimed that QWERTY deliberately slowed down the typist to avoid jams in typewriters. However, it is necessary to explore other points of view. Bill Hammack, YouTube’s “Engineer Guy”, explains some of them in his video.
Two other myths that dance around the Dvorak keyboard are that QWERTY was a random design, and that it succeeded only because it came first. If the latter were true 100 percent of the time, Betamax would have beaten VHS, or we would still be using DIN connectors on keyboards instead of USB or PS/2. But if there is something we cannot deny, it is that the Dvorak keyboard was designed following several scientific principles (explained in Dvorak’s book, Typewriting Behavior), such as movement studies conducted at the beginning of the 20th century. In many cases, these studies involved factory workers using small lights on their fingers to better track movements in front of primitive cameras.
In reality, there is no magical reason or super-conspiracy for why we don’t use the Dvorak keyboard today. Although it is true that the QWERTY keyboard had a minimal advantage “for being first” on the market, other possibilities must also be considered. First, August Dvorak was not what you might call a “great salesman” of his keyboard. On more than one occasion, his position as a psychologist led him to divide the situation into harms and benefits in relation to the QWERTY keyboard, which is not always useful when convincing someone that “this is better”.
Over the years, Dvorak’s scientific perspective was eroded by the appearance of new studies, such as “Why alphabetic keyboards are not easy to use”, developed by Donald Norman and Diane Fisher from the University of California, in which they acknowledge an increase in speed in favor of the Dvorak keyboard, but it is only five percent at best.
With this, one could conclude that QWERTY maintains its dominance because it “is sufficient”, and because the cost/benefit equation of the Dvorak keyboard yields a poor result. Any new technology must carry a certain weight in its improvements. If that percentage had been higher, surely our keyboards would be Dvorak at this moment.
