What makes a good UI good?

But why the commoner letters are almost all on the left hand, who knows? Was the person who designed it a leftie?

The QWERTY layout was designed for mechanical typewriters with two aims; firstly that key strokes would alternate from the left to the right side so that the type writer arms wouldn’t clash, and secondly to generally slow down the typist to give more time for the mechanism to reset, I assume that locating the common keys on the normally less used hand helped with this.

The QWERTY layout was designed for mechanical typewriters with two aims; firstly that key strokes would alternate from the left to the right side so that the type writer arms wouldn’t clash, and secondly to generally slow down the typist to give more time for the mechanism to reset, I assume that locating the common keys on the normally less used hand helped with this.

The former is clearly logical, I believe the latter has been debunked with trials showing competent typists achieving the same rates no matter what the layout.

Competent typists can no doubt type fast on any layout, but for beginners QWERTY takes quite some getting used to and reduces the need to try to unpry three stuck arms with a screw driver every few seconds. I used to play with the Dad’s old Remington after his office moved to those new flanged electric typewriters.

has been debunked with trials showing competent typists achieving the same rates no matter what the layout.

Debunked how? Because let me tell you – there is a world of difference between using computer keyboards and using mechanical typewriters.

Debunked how? Because let me tell you – there is a world of difference between using computer keyboards and using mechanical typewriters.

Back in yesteryear I had a typewriter, I used it for the local CAMRA newsletter. Then I got Ovation and a decent printer.

Don’t ask me to fetch out the info about the testing/trial as it was something I read years ago. Last century in fact.

The main thing that slows people down, initially, is the apparently random placement of the characters in the alphabet.

You can achieve the same effect on a computer by presenting people with a US key layout and asking them to enter typical code. Give them time to get used to that layout, and they are back to normal speed.

All that shows is that with the introduction of electronic typing, the slow down failed. It does not debunk the fact that it was designed to slow down typing on mechanical typewriters.

Actually it demonstrates that the concept of random placement will fail every time once the user has become accustomed to the layout.

I could just as easily said “You can achieve the same effect on a typewriter by presenting people with a US key layout and asking them to enter typical code.”

Where the user is used to a UK layout, there will be an initial slowness, but it will not last.

As I said earlier: “The main thing that slows people down, initially, is the apparently random placement of the characters in the alphabet.”

To be clear, the trials were done on mechanical typewriters.

The well documented intent was to slow down typists.

And it failed, except in the short term.

Even my cheapo childhood typewriter (that I used to “print out” my source code by hand as a kid, before I got a printer) was a speedball typewriter.

Not a common item in the UK, but then where exactly are the inventors of the ball mechanism (IBM) based?

Oh the fun of using a old (built like a brick shithouse) typewriter – two strong fingers :-)

Mind you it didn’t work too well after it was lifted about two inches out of it’s perch followed by a half roll and ending on the deck on it’s keys :-(

As to layout – there are two variants of Morse code – probably best using the version you know – like keyboard layout.

[Edit]

When speed gets up – you seem to be sending/typing words not simple letters.

two strong fingers :-)

Oh, indeed.

I can’t find it right now, but somewhere I have a typewriter that looks like this:

Got it from a charity shop just before leaving the UK (so it is qwerty). Even features adjustable ribbon holder to support black or red typing.

But a few hours using that, and instant respect to secretaries that used to use such devices, especially those with a high wpm count. Modern keyboards are nothing in comparison.

Never managed to jam it. Just couldn’t get my fingers to suffer that much abuse.
Mom, on the other hand, could. And she was infinity pleased that it didn’t have an annoying Ctrl key that does weird things…

Edit: when I lived in Somerset in the early 90s, I had an even older weirder typewriter. There was no 0 or 1 (use l and O), and I think ! was a mixture of l and . or something. Some other oddities, but thankfully exorcised from my memory.

I don’t think golfball typewriters were that common over here. In the offices I’ve been in (pre computer), daisy wheels were popular. I think in the spare room there’s an old Brother daisy wheel typewriter… or maybe it got thrown out? It would sometimes lose the plot and output gibberish. Cleaning the sensor (it was a wheel with slits like inside ball mice) didn’t help. I did that in the 90s, and still have the mark on my finger from where the wheel spun up (I thought the thing was off, it wasn’t) and sliced deep into the flesh. Oddly, it didn’t hurt at all, but there was a ridiculous amount of blood. The office temp (she was twenty something) promptly fainted. Mom doused it in alcohol (that hurt!), wrapped it in kitchen roll for a few minutes, then stuck a plaster on it. Job done. :-)

Oh the fun of using a old (built like a brick shithouse) typewriter

There were a number of IBM terminal typewriters going cheap in 1981 – these were golfball typewriters driven by motors and solenoids which required ten control signals. A 2708 EPROM and a bit of circuitry allowed it to be driven from a parallel interface, each character being looked up via the EPROM to produce the correct eight logic values, the other two being inferred. Now that was noisy but you could use as many different golfballs as you had space in the 2708 to accommodate its character set.

How to prepare artwork for a twin column A5 page newsletter:

Type everything on a till-roll and then literally “cut & paste” :)
Photocopy and check for odd blobs, hand over to reprographic person¹ at business some miles down road.
That till-roll column forming was why Ovation, Impression Publisher and Ovation Pro got so much use over a number of years. The cut and paste wasn’t that much fun…

¹ Interestingly said (former, retired now) business owner has actually lived in the same dormitory village as me for decades and I only found out a couple of years ago when his wife visited my wife’s business.

I still have this beast – I know exactly where it is, but it’s in our old house (now our son’s) and hasn’t yet made it to Scotland where I am now.

By far the nicest portable typewrite I’ve ever handled, with a shaded face and carbon ribbon. I was a fast typist on it, and it took it out of my fingers! The old hot metal typesetting machines were worse, much worse. But the worst of all was the Varityper that I used at Peace News:

Clive, I think you got your photos mixed up. The picture of the Varityper appears to be some sort of medieval torture device.

The strangest typewriter I ever used? A Brother EP-20. From the early ‘80s, it was actually quite advanced, being able to buffer a line of text (and had cursor correction), it supported loads of accents and weird characters, and it would run happily off a handful of batteries (D cells, if I remember correctly).
Now the downsides. It was a thermal dot matrix printer, so it either used little cartridges of thermal ink that were hideously expensive given that 90% of it was unused, or it printed on to thermal paper (it was quite happy with fax roll). Also, the matrix resolution was insanely low, something like 5×7. It actually managed to look worse than a bog standard fx80. That’s saying something.

Still, it was an interesting machine, and mom appreciated writing to her Spanish pen friends using the correct accents. Something that was harder than it ought to have been…

That is interesting, as the Daisy Wheel came later

Yes, that surprises me. You’d have thought the mechanism for the daisy wheel would be a heck of a lot simpler than the tilt and rotate of the ball.

I can only assume that the original ball printers were actually mechanical devices, which would explain why they came first.

If the IBM terminal typewriter, which used a golfball, was being got rid of in 1981 as unwanted surplus it must have been around for 10 years or more beforehand. It was entirely mechanical with tilt and rotate for the golfball done by solenoids, a motor running all the time to keep a spring wound and solenoids for carriage return and line feed. A long cable trailed out of it for it to be operated.