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If this was about efficiency, we would all be typing on the far more efficient Dvorak layout now, on tablets, on laptops, on everything, not on a QWERTY layout that was developed for nineteenth century typewriters. The QWERTY keyboard layout perpetuates an illusion that we are still working on an ancient typewriter. And we all go along with it. Resistance to learning something new is a very strong factor even among geeks, and I don't exempt myself from that!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard

The continued use of the ever popular QWERTY versus Dvorak keyboard story [...] are sad commentaries on the lack of respect for historical accuracy
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Ignored in these stories of Dvorak's superiority is a carefully controlled experiment conducted under the auspices of the General Service Administration in the 1950s comparing QWERTY with Dvorak. In the experiment, a group of typists were retrained on the Dvorak keyboard. When these retrained Dvorak typists regained their prior QWERTY speed, a group of QWERTY typists began additional training on the QWERTY keyboard, while the new Dvorak typists continued their training. This parallel training is important because it is always possible to improve a typist's performance on any keyboard with additional training. The QWERTY typists were carefully selected to constitute a proper control group for the Dvorak typists, and other scientific controls were applied. The conclusion of the study was that the QWERTY typists always performed better than the Dvorak typists. Thus the experiment contradicted the claims made by advocates of Dvorak and concluded that it made no sense to retrain typists on the Dvorak keyboard. This study, which was influential in its time, brought to an end any serious efforts to shift from QWERTY to Dvorak.
Modern research in ergonomics also reaches similar conclusions. This research consists of simulations and experiments that compare various keyboard designs. It finds little advantage in the Dvorak keyboard layout, confirming the results of the GSA study.
So on what basis were the claims of Dvorak's superiority made? We discovered that most, if not all, of the claims of Dvorak's superiority can be traced to the patent owner, Professor August Dvorak.