John Parkinson thinks the world has been tied to an Industrial Age keyboard for long enough.
One of a long line of entrepreneurs and scientists who have been outraged by the seeming illogic of the standard QWERTY keyboard, the 62-year-old electrical engineer is showing off a new, rival keyboard design next month at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
He touted the idea at CES last year, too, but this time he has actual keyboards, which will be released to distributors in February. After years of hunt-and-peck typing, he's convinced that there is room for change and that if he can show the way, bigger companies might follow.
"For the longest time, I thought, like everyone else, there's nothing you can do about QWERTY," Parkinson said. "In the end, some ideas occurred to me, and I decided to do something about it myself."
Like many of those that have come before, Parkinson's New Standard Keyboards are arranged alphabetically but with a twist. Instead of lining up the letters all the way across, he splits the keyboard in two, like most ergonomic keyboards. He then assigns the first half of the alphabet to the left hand and the second half to the right.
New Standard Keyboards
Is this enough to finally unshackle the typing legions from the mixed-up mess of an ordinary keyboard? Probably not. The average typist has spent enough time learning the QWERTY keyboard to make relearning even a better system unlikely, most experts say.
The QWERTY keyboard itself — named after the position of the first six letters in the top left hand corner — is mostly an accident of mid-19th mechanical technology.
Modern typewriter inventor Christopher Sholes initially experimented with arranging the keys in alphabetical order but discovered that the bars holding the letters collided and jammed too often as they struck the paper. He rearranged the letters into their current form in order to keep commonly used letters on different sides of the machine, reducing those collisions.
A well-publicised typing contest between the first QWERTY touch typist and a rival using a different system helped settle the issue in the public mind. The QWERTY user, a court reporter named Frank McGurrin, won hands down and went on a celebrity tour around the United States to show off his lightning-fast fingers.
In 1936, University of Washington professor August Dvorak patented a new system. Research on the system, he claimed, showed that it was vastly more efficient than the QWERTY layout. While many still accept Dvorak's claim, the actual product failed to undermine QWERTY's dominance.
The computer age has seen much more experimentation, from one-handed keyboards to virtual keys in which finger motion is read by lasers. The only real changes to be adopted widely have been the ergonomic evolutions, in which the two sides of the keyboard are split and rotated slightly away from each other, to let the hands rest more naturally.
"There's pretty strong evidence that the split keyboard... has a health advantage and can help reduce hand and arm pain," said David Rempel, a professor of medicine and ergonomics at the University of San Francisco.
There's no substantial evidence, however, that simply rearranging the keys offers health benefits, Rempel said.
Parkinson, a former aerospace engineer, said he was inspired to action after taking a typing class in which he reached 25 words a minute but then went back to hunt-and-peck after finding the touch-typing technique too distracting.
He concedes that earlier alphabetical designs have been even worse than QWERTY. But by splitting the alphabet into two groups, the letters wind up being placed more efficiently, he said. It puts punctuation and other keys in the center, potentially making them easier to reach.
He's ultimately hoping to work with larger companies but so far has been unable to spark their interest, he said.
"I pursued that aspect a little bit but decided it would be better to put it on market myself and prove (that) people want it," he said. "Then, maybe, the big companies will be interested."
Talkback
"Parkinson, a former aerospace engineer, said he was inspired to action after taking a typing class in which he reached 25 words a minute but then went back to hunt-and-peck after finding the touch-typing technique too distracting."
So because he sucks at touch typing, everyone else has to change their keyboard?
No one's going to buy his keyboards. The Dvorak keyboard layout is better, but no one uses it because we're all used to using the Qwerty layout (which is why it's almost impossible to find a Dvorak layout keyboard). The same will go for his keyboards.
Those used to a QWERTZ (German layout here) keyboard will always find it difficult to switch to a new style. I switched to an ergonomic design, it took a week or so of slower typing and mistakes until I got used to it. Then I carried the keyboard around with me everywhere I went, so that when I was working on customer sites, I had a comfortable keyboard.
The way to introduce a better concept - if it can be proved to be better and/or gives health benefits - is to train up the next generation on it, if it generates the same key codes as the existing keyboards, it is just a plug-and-pray operation.
People would then just bring with them to a new job the layout of their choice - or the company would offer a choice of keyboards when ordering a new machine...
Those that still worked better with QWERTY/QWERTZ/AZERTY etc. would stick to the old style keyboards and those that prefer the ABC would use theirs, gradually you would see the rise of the ABC layout and the decline of the traditional layout.
The problem will of course be that to start with, because of limited demand, the ABC keyboards will probably not be cost-effective compared to a traditional layout. It will be interesting to see where the umlated and accented keys are in his layouts for non-English languages.
Having worked in several countries with several keyboard layouts, I've found it relatively easy to adjust to slight differences in layouts, I look forward to seeing if this design will bring any advantages - if it brings all accents and umlauts etc. for a standard western alphabet with it, it may be a hit a bigger hit as you wouldn't need to swap keyboards for each country or language...
Parkinson's keyboard is interesting, but has a big problem.
Today, QWERTY keyboards have become in use all over the world including East Asia and Arab world. In those countries, QWERTYs are primarily used as devices to input native non-European language to the language-processing software which works as a convertor from alphabet to native-character.
In these cases, the advantage of Parkinson's keyboard almost does not make sense. The efficiency and easiness of writing in English is not the matter for them.
But there might be a small group of people scattered on the globe who want to try this new keyboard. Customizing a keyboard is not a difficult job for specialists in Taiwan or China. My recommendation for Parkinson is to contact those firms to launch small scale production and selling on the web. Isn't it a rare item, anyway?
It's a kind a metaphor on humans that we are using an inefficient keyboard when there are more efficient alternatives. Imagine the savings in the economy if everyone was touch typing on a Dvorak as opposed to one-fingered typing and the exclusiveness and cost/time spent on training touch-typers on QWERTY boards ?
It doesn't make sense to me to stick to something that is obviously inefficient and so common in communication. Inertia doesn't seem a good reason not to change IMHO.
A comparison can be made with mobile phone texting. All children should be taught shorthand to communicate (e.g. savings in the economy and better use of time in education), but it was never done. Along come mobiles and they make up a shorthand language of their own due to necessity.