RE: Re: Anybody here fluent in both Dvorak & QWERTY?

If I ordered a custom typewriter, I should certainly want to choose all the
characters and their locations. You could have done so, but it would have
cost more, as special type would have to be cast and key caps would have to
be stamped. You might at least have been able to request a more useful key
than ½/¼. (I don't know why English typewriters included those two
characters instead of some diacritical marks or at least the square
brackets.)
 
The extra work involved in assembling your typewriter may not have been so
great as you think. The company probably kept an inventory of type and key
caps for Dvorak, just as for other layouts other than Anglo-QWERTY.
 
Not long ago, someone asked me about having typewriters made with the Dvorak
layout today. An Indian company named Godrej does manufacture both manual
and electric typewriters for numerous languages, mostly for sale to the
Third World. Some years ago a representative said that the company would be
quite capable of filling an order for Dvorak typewriters. I do not know what
the minimum order would be (perhaps a few dozen machines), but we could look
into this if there were significant interest.
 
Scott Horne
 
 
 


  _____  

From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On
Behalf Of mailorderspam
Sent: 27 février 2009 14:48
To: [email protected]
Subject: [altkeyboards] Re: Anybody here fluent in both Dvorak & QWERTY?



Yes, I still have it, and I created a new photo album for it here:
http://groups.
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/altkeyboards/photos/album/884327237/pic/list>
yahoo.com/group/altkeyboards/photos/album/884327237/pic/list
or you can just click Photos on the left after logging in and look for
the album labeled "Smith Corona Coronet Automatic 12",

I see your album there for the 1971 Smith Corona 250, pb, and the
keyboard layout is about the same on mine as on yours,
with the number row we don't see much anymore. I'm the original
owner of mine. I see you "found" yours in Berkeley. Do you know the
story behind its creation?

I'll tell you how I got mine. I had read an article in, I think, Time
or Newsweek in late 1972 or early 1973 touting the more efficient,
faster keyboard layout, which made a lot of sense to me. (It
understated, in my opinion, the challenge at least to me of learning
the new layout. The article may have cited the USNavy study which has
since been disputed that Qwerty typists can be retrained in Dvorak in
a few weeks.) But I was intrigued. I thought the Qwerty was goofy
and inefficient, too. I was going to have to be typing a lot of
papers in college the following year, and I figured I could make the
switch over the summer.

I went to a Smith Corona dealer. He had never heard of Dvorak
keyboards, but he had a Smith-Corona catalog which showed which
electric typewriter models they had that could be factory-ordered
with a Dvorak keyboard. I picked this one. I think the typewriter
itself cost about $225 in 1973 with about a $75 upcharge for the
custom keyboard-- I may be wrong about these costs. But I can't
imagine any manufacturer being willing to go to this kind of trouble
for $75 these days. I mean, somebody had to install the keys by hand
and solder in the type slugs in a non-standard order to make this
work, and test it all out. That's a lot of trouble. It took about a
month for the typewriter to come in. Smith-Corona didn't ask me what
I wanted in the top row, and as with pb's SC 250, this is what they
installed there:
shifted: 1/4 # ( ) " % __ c $ @ * + "c" was
the cents symbol key
unshifted: ! 7 5 3 1 9 0 2 4 6 8 =

I think August Dvorak himself toyed around with various combinations
including the top row. These days, most Dvorak typists just use a
QWERTY arranged top row. and I do as well. I don't find any advantage
to reordering the number keys!

Brad

--- In altkeyboards@ <mailto:altkeyboards%40yahoogroups.com>
yahoogroups.com, "pbrun01" <pbrun01@...> wrote:
>
> I don't know how to touch-type on the qwerty arrangement because I 
> never learned to. For many years I was a two fingered typist on qwerty, 
> how embarrassing to think about that...
> I decided to learn to touch-type when I bought my first computer 
> in '02. Went with Dvorak. Got rigged up with a vintage IBM clicky 
> keyboard with re-arranged keycaps. Funny thing is, if I try to do 
> the "hunt and peck" on the dvorak keyboard, it's really hard and I have 
> to look around for each letter. I can still hunt-and-peck pretty 
> quickly on qwerty on those rare occasions that I have to (such as using 
> a computer to look for a book at the public library).
> Hey, do you still have that Smith-Corona typewriter?? If so, post up 
> some photos.
> 
> 
> 
> --- In altkeyboards@ <mailto:altkeyboards%40yahoogroups.com>
yahoogroups.com, "mailorderspam" 
> <mailorderspam@> wrote:
> >
> > I learned QWERTY first, in 8th grade, over 40 years ago, and was
> > typing about 50 wpm.
> > 
> > Six years later, I abandoned QWERTY and switched to Dvorak,
> > self-taught, with nothing to help me make the switch other than
> > modifications I made to a QWERTY typing manual. (This was long before
> > there was typing software or PCs with software-switchable keyboard
> > layouts that help with that. Smith Corona made me a dedicated DSK
> > electric typewriter.)
> >
>







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