Remember when being 'all thumbs' was a BAD thing?

(8:02 am)
Holy crap. I never thought a blank page combined with an obligation to write would present me with a problem. Anyone who knows me knows it's never stopped me from running my mouth. (BTW, there's a term for that: "logorrhea.") When writing an accepted assignment, whether for a class, or for some publication (usually political,) the subject material, and the point of it, has been obvious to me. Usually, the keyboard is my enemy just because I'm a lousy one-to-two finger typist, which is why I've always preferred speaking.

But one of the tenets of writing is "Write what you know." And I know I promised myself that I'd write, and post. So it's the act, not the content, that's the point of sitting here, between the gym and the shower, before going to work (yes, I have a regular job) and banging on this keyboard.

Let's talk about the keyboard, then. The standard terminology for this device is a 'QWERTY' keyboard, named for the six keys in the upper left half-a-row of letter keys. My mother is a past master (mistress?) of the keyboard, being a journalist. She could bang out 85+ words a minute on a mechanical Smith-Corona with hammers that swung up on arms from a central arc of hinge pins. Her earliest predecessors in the world of typing could type far faster. In fact, with a keyboard laid out in alphabetic order, in 3 or 4 rows, those early typists could go so fast that the weak metal available for the arms that hammered the type fonts onto the page would soon give up. The resulting tangle of bent metal, like undercooked spaghetti, confounded engineers. Then one came up with an idea: if we couldn't find a metal strong enough to withstand the use (and of course cheap enough to make typewriters profitable,) we could make the typists slower.

But how? Easy. Rearrange the keyboard so that, in an English-speaking population of 90% right-handed persons, the most frequently-used letters are on the rows away from 'home', under fingers that are the weakest, and usually on the left. The five most frequently-used letters in the English language are E,T,O,A and N. Look at them on your keyboard. The first two are on the upper, LEFT row, the last two are on the upper right or lower off-center. have to reach, using third or fourth fingers. And the A, the only one on the home row, is on the farthest left key, under the weakest finger.

Unfortunately, by the time this layout had become standardized across manufacturers, metallurgy had caught up with need. But it was too late. The intentional crippling of typed communication was permanent. The IBM Selectric made the arms obsolete, and the computer keyboard made the need for moving parts almost moot. (I still have a key that sticks on one of my laptops...)

iPhones and iPads rely on virtual keyboards on touchscreens, and still use this layout. Others have been invented, the Dvorak for one, that are designed to increase typing speed. All are far more functional that the QWERTY keyboard. But you've never seen any of them, have you?

Now, the keyboards on cell phones are so small that they can only be typed on with thumbs, because the rest of the hand is needed to hold the phone. An icebreaker I often use to interrupt people texting in the middle on parties or events is "Remember when being 'all thumbs' was a bad thing?" Yet even here, there are speed contests, and instead of rearranging the keyboard to be more useful, the language is instead rewritten to use fewer keystrokes, or phonic versions of words. BTW, it sux.

So, sometimes it's worth going back and re-examining the original idea, the contraints, and their results, rather than just continuing on.

An exercise for those interested: See those solid-rocket boosters on the side of the Space Shuttle's main booster? The ones that fall off about half-way to orbit. Why are they that diameter? Here's a hint: Roman chariots. I'm not kidding. Look it up.
(8:42 am)(8:49am)