In the mood...

I've developed a good head of "gotta get rid of those books" righteousness.

Three boxes, and counting.

Now, to make sure they actually go down the driveway, one way or another!

Cheers...

I had a lot of spare time in those days...

One of my responses to the LANTRA-L mailing list from nearly 12 years ago:

At 04:46 PM 1/22/98 +0100, you wrote:

Urban myth time there: the main point of the QWERTY layout was not to slow the typist, but to keep the hammers of the typewriter which were likely to jam each other when typed consecutively separate. On a mechanical typewriter the key positions were determined by the order of the hammers. The layout that it superseded was just alphabetical order, not particularly appropriate for fast typing either.

Sorry to disagree; there's no urban myth here. If you examine the hammers of a manual typewriter, you'll note that each hammer must pass through a narrow area near the end of its arc as it strikes the platen. Hammers can jam in that area whether they are next to one another or at opposite ends of the hammer array, and will jam if a returning letter does not clear the platen area before an incoming hammer enters. The only way to make sure the returning key has time to clear the "jam zone" is to delay the depression of the next key, which is accomplished by limiting the typist's ability to strike any two keys rapidly in succession.

Digging into my old copy of Gaines' "Cryptanalysis," I find that, in normal English, the 56 digrams one can construct without moving one's fingers off the home row (AA, AS, AD, etc.) account for only roughly 6% of all two-letter combinations found in normal English. (This, BTW, means that 94% of all digrams require at least one finger to travel away from the home row.)

Indeed, if we consider the most popular digrams in English, at least 50% (if we consider only TH, IN, ER, RE, HE, EN, TI, ТЕ, ON, OU, IT, OR, NT, HI, VE, CO, RO, RI, and IO) involve no home-row keys.

Of the 20 most common English trigrams - which account for over 75% of all three-letter combinations in English - nine (THE, ING, ION, ENT, TIO, ERE, HER, VER, TER) involve no home-row keys, nine (FOR, ATE, TEA, ATI, HAT, ERS, HIS, RES, ARE) involve one home-row key, and only two (AND, ILL) employ two home-row keys.

The distinguishing characteristic of typing on a manual typewriter equipped with a QWERTY keyboard is having to constantly move the fingers away from their home position (and not to coordinate hammer strikes from different areas in the array), so the assertion that QWERTY was meant to slow down typists (which, by the way, is admitted by typewriter companies such as IBM) is quite valid.

LANTRA was a pretty good list until all the sniping, trolling, and off-topic posts drowned the signal in all too much noise for my taste.

Cheers...