The keyboard

[Steve]

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======================

Defunct Keys and Odd Commands Still Bedevil Today's PC User 

Jennifer Lee
NY Times


Every time you sit down at a computer, you come into contact with an
item that has been pretty much unchanged for 15 years: the keyboard.
During that time -- an eon at today's technological pace -- mice have
multiplied, monitors have grown and microprocessors have become
exponentially more powerful. But like some awful new-wave band, the
standard PC keyboard has remained mired in the early 1980's. 

It has not remained that way because the design is optimal -- quite
the contrary. Many designers criticize the keyboard for serving a
befuddling mix of obsolete needs. Of the sprawling 101 keys on the
standard keyboard, a good number are either redundant, confusing or
vestigial. 

While the Esc key often does escape, Pause seldom pauses. These days
few people can articulate what SysRq is. At least Microsoft revived
Print Scrn from the depths  of obsolescence by using it for a
screen-shot function in Windows. Perhaps one day Microsoft will find a
scroll to lock for Scroll Lock. 

"All these old buttons on the keyboard are literally the carrying over
of the original sin," said Regis Magyar, one of the designers who
worked on the standard keyboard design, which was introduced by the
International Business Machines Corporation in 1984. 

"We sort of need an exorcist to clean these keyboards out now." 

The illogic doesn't stop there. The keys for the comma and the
period, along with keys for opening and closing parentheses and
brackets, are all next to each other, but the forward slash and the
backward slash are two rows away from each other. And someone should
explain why the Caps Lock light is often on the opposite end of the
keyboard from the Caps Lock button. 

Unfortunately, as engineers have realized over the years, renovating
one of the most entrenched designs in computer history is nearly
impossible. Few other items are used on a regular basis by as many
people who have developed a skill set around it. And new keyboards
must be compatible with a huge array of existing software, making the
removal of keys difficult. 

As a result, debates over keyboards are a little like debates over
the Federal budget. Everybody wants spending cuts, as long as it
doesn't affect them. 

"People are always hesitant to take away a key, because it was there
for some reason and you don't want to be the one to take it away and
not have some application out there work anymore," said John Karidis,
an engineer at I.B.M. 

The keyboard's entrenchment has become worldwide, conquering even
nations that don't have primary languages based on the Roman alphabet.
Japan and China, for example, have adapted to the standard keyboard,
with many users finding it easier to type Romanized phonetic words on
the 101-key keyboard and have the computer convert them into Chinese
and Japanese characters. 

Keyboards constructed around the 50 Japanese "katakana" phonetic
characters were too bulky compared with the standard Roman keyboards,
said Izumi Kimura, a Japanese technology historian. Users showed a
preference for the 101-key keyboard, with its smaller alphabet. "I
personally think that the number of keys has been decisive," he said.

The standard keyboard design was arrived at in a relatively arbitrary
manner, a combination of legacies and historical accidents that began
with the patent of the so-called Qwerty typewriter in 1878. 

The Qwerty layout, named for the first six letters of the top row, is
the subject of much debate. The layout was designed by C. L. Sholes
during the late 1860's so that typewriter hammers would not get
caught on one another. A result, intended or not, was that it slowed
down typists. 

Even now, the layout is criticized for overworking the weaker ring
and pinky fingers. 

Alternative layouts emerged, most notably the Dvorak keyboard, which
was patented in 1932 by August Dvorak and W. L. Dealey. But a number
of studies have shown that it is only 6 percent to 10 percent faster
than Qwerty, enough for a niche following but not enough for typists
to throw out Qwerty and relearn touch-typing. 

Qwerty has its proponents, too. Brian Shacklel, professor emeritus of
human sciences at Loughborough University in England, said that
Qwerty is actually near optimal, primarily because it allows many
keystrokes to be made by alternate hands. 

As computer keyboards evolved from typewriters, extra keys were added
to accommodate the proliferation of new functions. If the "hardware
wars" between marketers, engineers and accountants had worked out
differently at I.B.M., Dr. Magyar said, we all might be using
vertical-only Enter keys and a half-size Backspace key. 

"All these decisions were political and economic compromises," he
said. 

"The bean counters didn't care how much users liked it." 

In spite of its flaws, the design inspired many copycats after it was
introduced. "Radio Shack said if the big boys did it, we'll do it,"
Dr. Magyar said. "Compaq said I.B.M. must be right. So everyone
copied us." 

Within a few years, the 101-key layout became the industry standard
for PC's. Even Apple Macintoshes adopted similar keyboards, but with
Command instead of Control keys and Option instead of Alt. 

Many of the keyboard's quirks are left over from the time when
engineers had to balance the needs of older mainframes and the
emerging PC's. Keys like SysRq, Pause and Break are relics from the
mainframe era. Ins, Del, Home, Page Up, End and the arrow keys were
all introduced for editing functions to fill out forms on mainframes.
Scroll Lock and Print Screen were developed for the DOS operating
system. But as software and hardware has become more sophisticated,
the keyboard has remained the same. 

One of the great curiosities is the NumLock key, which allows users
to toggle between number keys (which exist elsewhere on the keyboard)
and arrow and utility keys in a single keypad area (which also exist
elsewhere on the keyboard). In fact, the entire 17 keys of the number
keypad make up a wholly redundant area of the keyboard. 

"Everyone hates NumLock," said Dr. Magyar, who noted that the number
keypad was created to accommodate spreadsheets. But even as the other
utilities gained independent real estate, the redundancy remained to
accommodate old software. "NumLock is a dead key as far as I am
concerned," Dr. Magyar said. 

But one constituency remains faithful to the key. "NumLock is pretty
valuable to players of many first-person games like Quake," said Dan
Horn, a University of Michigan graduate student who has done research
on keyboard designs, "because the number pad allows users to move
diagonally more easily than the dedicated arrow buttons where two key
presses are necessary." 

Not all of the keyboard's design is arbitrary. The inverted-T format
of the arrow keys was chosen for its efficiency. An analysis of
typists by the Digital Equipment Corporation revealed that the most
common switch between two keys was from the down-arrow key to the
left-arrow key, so those keys were put next to each other, according
to Michael Good, who worked on the project. 

"Back in the late 70's and early 80's, the arrow key functions were
all over the keyboard," Good said. 

"Wordstar had them as control keys on the regular keyboard. Other
people had them on the numeric keypad. 

They were arranged in squares and diamonds." Dr. Magyar caught sight
of Digital's inverted-T design in a computer magazine during the
early 1980's, and adopted it for the I.B.M. keyboard. 

As soon as I.B.M.'s standard keyboard emerged in 1984, competitors
rushed to copy it. Some other keyboard designs were left trampled at
the sidelines, including one developed at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology called Etude that included keys for many of today's
commonly used functions like undo, cut, copy and paste. Though
Macintosh computers originally had simpler keyboards when they were
introduced in 1984, they soon offered extended keyboards that
paralleled the PC 101-key model. But the relatively new Apple iMac
has a streamlined keyboard. 

"The iMac keyboard is hugely downsized, making people both happy and
sad," Amelia Morrow, a longtime Macintosh owner, said. 

Along the way, some additional keys have been introduced, most
notably the three extra iconic keys -- two Windows keys and a menu
key -- on Microsoft's Natural Keyboard, which have half-heartedly
been accepted by users since their introduction in 1994. "It's hard
to see why they bothered with the keys," said Richard Penn, who
considers the Windows keys useless and redundant. "I think it came
from a marketing goal to 'brand' the keyboard, rather than a
usability goal." 

Many of the design pressures affecting keyboards have to do with the
shrinking size of personal devices like subnotebook computers.
Typically, the number pad is the first to go, then the large keys get
trimmed, then the entire keyboard is shrunk. One ingenious design was
I.B.M.'s butterfly-concept keyboard on the Thinkpad, which is made up
of two halves that fold up when the laptop is closed. 

Another attempt to save space is the chordal keyboard, versions of
which have appeared since the late 1980's. It has far fewer keys and
takes up less space. 

A chordal keyboard requires simultaneous key presses for each
character typed, similar to playing a musical chord on a piano. 

With as few as 5 keys, there are 31 chord combinations that may
represent letters, numbers, words, commands or other strings. But
they take a great deal more training, and are a lot less intuitive. 

A number of companies have made one-handed Qwerty keyboards.
One-handed keyboards were first developed in conjunction with the
mouse. 

Until voice-recognition or some other interface takes over, the
keyboard will probably remain, and remain largely the same. 

"Because novices are flocking to computers in droves to get on the
Web, there is going to be more pressure to make computers as easy to
use as possible," said Horn, who uses a Dvorak keyboard. 

"People are comfortable with the current style of keyboard. Even if
they are not good typists, they understand how the keyboard works,
and can get by with hunt-and-peck strategies." 

Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company 
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