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Since I'm going to be travelling for the next few days, I thought I'd take the opportunity to sketch a few quick thoughts about my experience with the Dvorak keyboard (it's been great) over the past twenty years.

I first heard about the Dvorak keyboard layout when I was a graduate student in Sociology at UCLA. The person who told me about it made a habit of collecting weird information, and he said "There's a keyboard layout that's much better than the existing one. And you can switch over in just a week or so. You can type over 100 words a minute."

I was skeptical, but went up to the UCLA Research Library and in the entire shelf of books on typewriting, I found the original Navy/A and P Grocery study by Dvorak, that described the keyboard layout, the studies of people switching over to Dvorak, and the advantages. There were three advantages.

• Less work typing, because of less finger movement
• Just about anyone could learn to type 60 words per minute
• Super speeds of over 100 wpm were possible.

However, they quoted several weeks to get up to speed, after taking a two-week layoff from typing. I was game. I anticipated not having a secretary, and I thought it would be advantageous to be able to type quickly and effortlessly, hour after hour.

The only problem? How to get this Dvorak layout! This was just before the dawn of the personal computer age, and although a popular article asserted that it was possible to order a Dvorak layout typewriter from any typewriter manufacturer, this turned out not to be true. Some research at the nearby Department of Linguistics revealed that the best that could be done was to order an IBM Selectric typewriter element (the little typeface ball) from a company in Hawaii that made custom elements with phonetic symbols, corporate logos, and so forth. A custom element, say with the McDonalds logo on it, would set you back a mere five grand.

The good news was that they had a stock Dvorak element. Get one of those, pop it in your Selectric, and voila! The bad news was two-pronged. First, the Selectric had a hardware hack (not what we called it at the time) to improve print quality. A cable, the "velocity cable" caused the print head not to print as hard on the period, the comma, and the semicolon. Unfortunately, in the Dvorak layout these positions are occupied by letters, which would print out very faintly. The solution? Get the IBM service guy (it was always a guy) to "Disconnect the Velocity Cable." He would always say "But your period and your comma will print through the page." Since the period and the comma, re-mapped to where the 'w' and the 'e' are located in QWERTY, were already printing right through the paper, this wasn't much of an issue, and after a little incomprehensible explanation he usually just did it.

The other bad news was that an IBM selectric was out of the price range of what a student could afford. So, in those early days, more drastic measures were necessary to get a Dvorak keyboard and reach those typing super-speeds. But more of that tomorrow.