QWERTY is a lousy interface to translate human thought into words; It’s been with us in technological shifts - we’ve tolerated it from typewriters, personal computers, and phones. If the computer is a bicycle for the mind, QWERTY is the rusty chain we never replaced while upgrading everything else. But maybe… we may not need to?

We tried fixing it along the way with Dvorak, Colemak, without much adoption. I think it’s partly in the names, right? Branding? No one ever sounded cool saying, “I use dvorak” sounds like an ED pill. What about the “slick layout” or if someone like Tom Hanks made the “T-Hanks layout.” It would gain adoption… that guy knows typewriters.

Speaking of which, let’s go on a quick history side quest:

Typewriters are where this original sin took place. Don’t know the story? Let me show you on my Smith Corona. (roll in paper) (type in “friends, please like & subscribe) (hit the bell on keyboard) No, I didn’t buy this for the video. Yes, I’m that pretentious, but I didn’t actually write this script on this either.

In fact, if you try using a typewriter as a main writing tool with modern typing speeds, you see why QWERTY was invented. (type fast - “I don’t really use this anymore” - keys should jam). It’s stuck.

Yes, like a piano, this tool has little hammers that smack ink onto your paper. The inventors were inspired by a Scientific American article alluding to a “literary piano”, isn’t that pretty? Now, the inventors almost got stun-locked by this phrase, so much so, the first iteration had piano-like keys, but then it got swapped for buttons, thankfully.

But unlike pianos, where the keys hammer up, and the strings are different lengths, these hammers’ lengths are different so that they may hit the center in the exact same spot. This design constraint begs for some relief from paper smacking. So they rearranged the letters around the constraint. That’s like arranging the phone around a camera. oh…

But that’s it! That’s the origin of QWERTY! They consulted some word people and did a bigram-frequency study, fancy words for how common two letters pair in English words - think “st”, “th”, or “in” and spread those pairs out to prevent jamming between paper smacks.

Now, you don’t need to enjoy smacks like Benji (show cat clip) here to realize that this is inefficient, but it was innovative thanks to the inventor C. Latham Sholes and his assistant Carlos Glidden when they began work on it in 1867. The Remington company (yes, that same gun manufacturer) acquired the invention in 1873 and later brought it to market on July 1, 1874. It sold like hotcakes, and it stuck like ink on paper ever since.

It’s hard to imagine qwerty as a recent technology

as it has been part of everyday life for most of us in English-dominant countries.

It’s everywhere, it shouldn’t be, including smart watches, car infotainment systems, gaming systems, smart TVs - if a streaming service requires me logging in via a qwerty keyboard on my TV, forget about it, babe, we’re missing the Super Bowl, I’m not doing this. Shout out to apps adapting QR codes or passkeys, and shame on those who haven’t.

I’m fed up with QWERTY. But why do you care, Gil?

I care because I hate typing on my phone, and that’s where it’s all the action happens. The world’s public squares happen online, and I want to hear what they have to say - and nothing stops human action more than a tiny bit of friction.

Maybe I’m a dramatic geriatric millennial, but I’ve literally not texted friends because my eyes glazed over how long typing the message would take with swipe texting.

It’s not like we haven’t tried new interfaces.

Besides changing the layout, we’ve had some innovation on what a writing interface could look like, and it comes from the accessibility space. It’s truly impressive and a great reminder that we humans are “tool builders” and can think outside the box. Here are a few cool ones - the orbi-touch, there’s this frogpad, and similarly the datahand. There are interfaces that don’t always need hands.

Stephen Hawking famously used the EZ-Keys software with face gestures, which would scan through letters and characters based on frequency in English words… sound familiar? Later on, Intel would work on a word predictive solution, using the context of the former words to suggest the next word, doubling his writing time. Imagine all the writing he never got to completing.

What will the final non-QWERTY form look like?

Lately, my favorite writing interface for quick writing has been voice-to-text. Most of us speak faster than typing, especially us yappers, and it’s easier. It’s been famously bad with early AI assistants like Siri, but it’s gotten a lot better; it just hasn’t reached the masses yet.

The typewriter pulled women into offices in the 1880s — and not by accident. Sholes used his own daughter Lillian to demonstrate the machine in promotional photos. Remington built it on a sewing machine stand with floral trim and sent attractive women to demo it at trade shows. The pitch was “easy enough for a woman.” It worked. Women went from under 4% of clerical workers in 1874 to 75% by 1900. The interface decided who got to participate. I hope voice-to-text and whatever comes next does the same thing — brings more people to writing.

there’s hope

I don’t think words in QWERTY. I think in ideas and work backwards in imperfect English to get you to see my idea. A lot of information is lost in translation. Every interface shift changes who gets to write. The next one will too — and I want to read what those people have been waiting to say. If the computer is a bicycle for the mind, it’s time we replaced the rusty chain.