It sounds rather like the origins of the QWERTY keyboard, which was designed in the late 1800s to minimize mechanical jams when the typebars swung up to hit the paper but persists to this day due to lock-in.
QWERTY was designed as a compromise between speed and jams. Characters which are frequently used as pairs together are placed on opposite sides, one for each hand. This has the effect of letting you use both hands pretty frequently. One of the compromises was that only the vowel 'a' ended up on the middle row. 'Maximally efficient' layouts like Dvorak are not provably any faster under real conditions.
As a Dvorak user, I can testify that, while it may not be faster (I didn't have an appreciable speed increase after switching), it sure feels more comfortable and natural when you do most of your typing on the home and upper rows, and common key clusters fall nicely in pinky-to-index order.
Comments
It sounds rather like the origins of the QWERTY keyboard, which was designed in the late 1800s to minimize mechanical jams when the typebars swung up to hit the paper but persists to this day due to lock-in.
QWERTY was designed as a compromise between speed and jams. Characters which are frequently used as pairs together are placed on opposite sides, one for each hand. This has the effect of letting you use both hands pretty frequently. One of the compromises was that only the vowel 'a' ended up on the middle row. 'Maximally efficient' layouts like Dvorak are not provably any faster under real conditions.
As a Dvorak user, I can testify that, while it may not be faster (I didn't have an appreciable speed increase after switching), it sure feels more comfortable and natural when you do most of your typing on the home and upper rows, and common key clusters fall nicely in pinky-to-index order.