What is a dvorak keyboard and who invented it?
Typewriter inventor Christopher Shoales designed the QWERTY arrangement in the 1870s because his early typewriters could not handle rapid typing speeds without jamming. Shoales’ layout fixed this problem by separating the most commonly struck key pairs. This arrangement intentionally slowed down typists to maximize the time between their keystrokes. 130 years later, the typewriter is gone, but the mechanical layout of the letters on the computer keyboard remains. The standard keyboard layout is immortalized with the name QWERTY, for the six letters on top row of the left hand. The Dvorak keyboard, named for its inventor, Dr. August Dvorak, was designed to maximize typing efficiency. Invented in 1936, his new layout has been slow to catch on, because unfortunately, QWERTY was already too well-entrenched. Dvorak (pronounced Duh-VOR-zhok) was a cousin to the Czech composer. The Dvorak keyboard is very simple: the five vowels AOEUI are under the home fingers of the left hand and the five m
The Dvorak Simplified Keyboard (pronounced /ˈdvɒræk/) is a keyboard layout patented in 1936 by August Dvorak, an educational psychologist and professor of education at the University of Washington in Seattle, and William Dealey. It has also been called the Simplified Keyboard or American Simplified Keyboard but is commonly known as the Dvorak keyboard or Dvorak layout. Although the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard (“DSK”) has failed to displace the QWERTY, it has become easier to access in the computer age, being included with all major operating systems (such as Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and BSD) in addition to the standard QWERTY layout. It is also supported at the hardware level by some high-end ergonomic keyboards. The Dvorak layout was designed to address the problems of inefficiency and fatigue which characterized the QWERTY keyboard layout. The QWERTY layout was introduced in the 1860s, being used on the first commercially-successful typewriter, the machine invented by Christ
