Re: Qwerty and Dvorak touch-typing.

["Michael Edwards" mje@xxxxxxxx]

                         Michael Edwards.

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[Phil Ferreira:]

>I gave up Qwerty for Dvorak in 1983 and I've never looked back. I wasn't
>much of a Qwerty typist. So it made no sense for me to try to maintain those
>old skills.
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   Well, maybe old - but surely hardly obsolete? Just about every keyboard in
the world is qwerty, and I see no evidence of the Dvorak making even a slight
dent in that. If anything, the Dvorak has retreated from the very slight
presence it once had.
   I do know that the science-fiction writer Piers Anthony uses it - but for
the most part I thought it was as dead as the dodo.
   Do you ever have to type on any keyboard other than your own Dvorak one?
Do you find you can still do it well?

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>However, I did know a woman who remained highly proficient on
>Qwerty even after she took up Dvorak.
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   And she got good at Dvorak too, did she? She had *both* skills
simultaneously?

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>I think that you may overestimate the need for Qwerty once you switch.
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   I don't see how you arrive at this: as I said, just about every keyboard is
qwerty. I don't think that's going to change in a hurry. In fact, I would
expect it to change only when keyboards themselves die out because everyone is
*talking* to their computers - something I'm not sure I personally could feel
easy with (as a person who refuses to speak to answering machines).

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>Every system running windows can be easily made to run Dvorak. (It's in the
>"properties" section of the standard US keyboard.
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   I'm not anxious to increase my dependence on Windows any more than I have
to. I still use DOS programs, and plan to keep doing so, and in fact I'm even
thinking about trying to obtain a good 486 laptop if I can find one (probably
second-hand) which can run exclusively on DOS, because I'm not in the slightest
happy with the way my current Windows laptop tries to run DOS programs.

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>You'll need to download
>some files from Microsoft to enable Dvorak with DOS, though.)
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   They still have that, do they? I thought they'd dropped everything to do
with DOS.
   However, I'm a bit wary of anything that adds layers of complexity to a
computer, because it seems to me it must make it less reliable. If to do this I
have to have extra things going, memory-resident programs, and so on, that would
be a bit of a turn-off.

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>And if you
>need to type on a standard typewriter...
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   Not a factor I have to consider.

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>You should also realize that in addition to greater speed there is less
>fatigue. Besides typing much faster, I can type for longer periods of time.
>Since the hands move much less with the Dvorak keyboard, you should be more
>relaxed when you type. And Xywrite can, of course, easily load a customized
>Dvorak keyboard.
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   Well, that certainly is attractive. I've been using an old dinosaur called
MultiMate for over a decade, for no reason other than that was the first
computer program I was introduced to by a friend, and I've stuck with it because
I could never decide what program to change to, and I wanted to choose right,
and change only once, because of all the bother that would be involved in
converting perhaps a few thousand MultiMate files.
   I've almost decided to get XY-Write (although I might still be a while
actually getting it), because I've heard various things that make me think it
must be very good, and close to my idea of what a good computer program is (an
extreme rarity in the Windows world, it seems to me).
   Anyway, thanks, Phil.

             Regards,
             Michael Edwards.