Since
writing was invented, man has always looked at what was writing.
Whether he was engraving a stone or a clay tablet or using a
quill pen on a piece of paper, man was always looking at each
picture or each word as it was committed to the medium being
used.
This continued even with the advent of the mechanical typewriter
in the second half of the 19th century. Although the typewriter
required the typist to look at the keys to find the right key
to tap, very soon a method was invented to tap the keys without
looking at the keyboard. This method is known as "touch-typing",
also known as keying by touch and touch keyboarding.
The touch-typing method enabled typists to achieve very high
input speeds (measured in terms of words per minute) and produced
celebrated competitions and entries in the Guinness Book of
Records.
However, use of the typewriter in this fashion required mastering
the touch-typing skill and this, together with short-hand writing,
became the core competencies of "secretaries" for
many decades.
The
advent of the Personal Computer
This modus operandi changed with the advent of the personal
computer in the early 80's. All of a sudden, millions of people
who were not trained to use the keyboard properly, that is,
to key by touch, began using the keyboard in the only way
they could, that is by looking at the keys.
The QWERTY key layout, a heritage from the old typewriter
days, did not help, as it did not the much greater number
of keys on the computer keyboard versus the mechanical typewriter.
With
the advent of the graphical user interface and the mouse,
the problem became even bigger. Now not only the keyboard
gained a few more keys, but also, the computer required that
the hand moved away from the keyboard very frequently thus
forcing the typist to reposition the hand many more times
per session than before.
All
of this has resulted in a huge global loss of productivity.
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