Here is a quick timeline of typewriter and Dvorak facts for those of you who are more text-based. We still think it's more fun to read the zine!
To the left is the only known photograph we have been able to find of August Dvorak, with a typing class at the University of Washington in Seattle. It was taken on November 14, 1932, the same year he released his new keyboard laytout.
Photo used with permission from the
University of Washington Libraries Digital Collection
1819 - Christopher Latham Sholes, inventor of the first commercially viable typewriter, is born near Mooresburg, PA.
1873 - Sholes invents the first practical typewriter, with the QWERTY keyboard layout.
1878 - Remington No. 2 typewriting machine introduced (fixed typebar design problems).
1888 - Touch typing with all ten fingers introduced by Frank E. McGurrin.
1889 - Sholes applies for a patent for an improved keyboard layout design (it was approved seven years later).
1890 - Sholes dies at the age of 71.
1894 - August Dvorak born.
1932 - After years of research, Dr. August Dvorak invents the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard Layout at the University of Washington.
1936 - Dr. Dvorak publishes his findings on the ergonomics and mathematics of typing in Typewriting Behavior: Psychology Applied to Teaching and Learning Typewriting. The book is currently out of print, but can still be found in many university libraries.
1975 - August Dvorak dies, a bitter man: "I'm tired of trying to do something worthwhile for the human race," he complained. "They simply don't want to change!"
1982 - ANSI approves the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard Layout as an official keyboard layout.
1997 - Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Guns, Germs and Steel", publishes The Curse of QWERTY in Discover magazine, explaining the history of QWERTY and Dvorak to a broad non-scientific audience.
2005 - Alec, Frunch and GCB self-publish The Dvorak Zine!
2011 - Alec, Frunch and GCB change the license of The Dvorak Zine to a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, allowing others to improve and translate it, so its message can continue to spread.
There are a number of keyboard layouts which use the principles of Dvorak but using the letter frequencies of different languages. Use these links to learn more about each layout.
International Dvorak Keyboard Layouts by Marcos Cruz - an amazing resource with information for over two dozen different languages!
Shiar.nl - information for Spanish, German, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, and Esperanto variants of Dvorak!