Some of those choices, of course, make no real difference. But others do. The transistor was invented and patented in the United States in the 1940s. So why does Japan today dominate the world market for transistorized consumer electronics products? Because the company that became Sony bought transistor licensing rights from Western Electric at a time when the American consumer electronics industry was committed to churning out vacuum tube models and reluctant to compete with its own products.
The origins of many other commitments are now lost in remote history. How did China become committed to its beautiful but hard-to- memorize writing system? Chinese children can master pinyin (a Roman alphabet adapted to Chinese) in one-tenth the time required to learn the traditional writing system. Why do Americans cling to the awkward English measuring system of pounds, inches, and gallons? How did we become committed to decimal counting and a 24-hour clock? Would we have been better off with other choices?
Those questions are tantalizing but perhaps academic, because there is no prospect of our abolishing the 60-minute hour or reverting to base-60 counting, even if such changes did prove advantageous. But we do have the choice of discarding QWERTY in favor of the Dvorak keyboard. For QWERTY typists, learning the Dvorak keyboard is quick and painless, since they’ve already mastered the hard part of typing--coordinating finger movements. A common but specious objection is that it would be prohibitively expensive to convert existing QWERTY office machinery. In reality, mechanical typewriters are vanishing anyway, and the keyboard of any word processor or computer can be converted--or changed back--merely by pressing buttons.
The only real obstacle to our adoption of the Dvorak keyboard is that familiar fear of abandoning a long-held commitment. But if we were to overcome that fear, millions of our children would be able to learn to type with increased speed, greatly lowered finger fatigue, greater accuracy, and a reduced sense of frustration. That seems reason enough to end our commitment to QWERTY, a bad marriage that has long outlived its original justification.
