You Looked.

We at the University of Florida have a bi-annual Career Fair/Career Showcase where students can meet hiring managers from different companies. Most of these companies give away various kind of tchotchkes at this event, I guess, to help students remember the company or maybe just to keep with the norm that started some time ago. These momentos are most often pens, Rubik’s cubes, bottle holders, caps, shirts etc. While these are what you would normally expect, Microsoft had a very interesting giveaway this time. They gave away some circular sticker (part plastic, part cloth), woven on which were some letters.

I didn’t know what to make out of this. Was it some kind of code? Or something really obvious that I was missing? When nothing hit me, I simply tried typing “DVORAK” in Google (you can say, I was feeling lucky!). And sure enough, this did pull up a lot of relevant stuff. It happens that there is a different type of layout than the QWERTY one that we have now come to take for granted. Typing on a QWERTY keyboard may come naturally to us, even though it was originally intended to be a method that prevented typebar clashes (remember the typewriter days?). The QWERTY layout became popular around 1878 and has held its own since. And this is despite a number of alternatives having been proposed. One of these famous alternatives was proposed by August Dvorak, an educational psychologist, in 1936. While the QWERTY layout was designed with a purpose that is no longer even relevant, Dvorak’s layout called Dvorak Simplified Keyboard (DSK) was based on an efficiency related criteria. The idea was to have minimal movement of fingers while typing out words (and punctuation marks) in the English language. Efficiency aside, it is even know to help prevent the carpal tunnel syndrome! :)

Want to try out the Dvorak layout? Hmm. Apart from the obvious pros, it does have a few obvious cons. Most importantly, the lack of these keyboards around us. But if you’re good at picking up things, you might just figure out a way around this problem too. Thankfully, in this layout the relative position of the keys is exactly the same as to how it is on our regular QWERTY keyboards. Also, major operating systems such as Windows, Mac OS X and Linux include this layout, essentially letting you change the layout with the mere click of a button. Meaning, if you can type without seeing (and you should learn that if you can’t), then not having a DVORAK specific keyboard should be the least of your problems. It will take some practice and patience, but hey, that’s the least you can do for the median nerve under your wrist.

And just in case you’re wondering, no, the letters DVORAK aren’t layed out the way you see them on Microsoft’s tchotchke. They are far apart. One thing’s for sure. DVORAK didn’t have any biases while laying out this keyboard :)