|
Monday, November 15, 2010
8 comments:
-
Anonymous said...
-
This was actually studied thoroughly by Bell Labs' Human Factors Engineers in the late '50's and early '60's. Turns out just about everybody except accountants prefer the upper-left one to the lower left version.
JLW III
(27 year Bell Labs Veteran.) -
11/15/10, 11:07 AM
-
Anonymous said...
-
As I recall, there was a lot of discussion about the layout of the numeric entry keypads for lat/long values in early digital flight navigation systems (think Inertial Nav and Area Nav computers). I remember reading one of the arguments in favor of the final layout was that air crews were more likely to be familiar with a telephone keypad than an accountant's calculator. - Skyhawker, Doug
-
11/15/10, 11:55 AM
-
Anonymous said...
-
The 10-key layout of a calculator existed before the touch-tone phone. When touch-tone came out, the telephone people were afraid that the system couldn't handle the input speed that avid 10-key users were capable of. They reversed the layout in order to slow people down so the system could keep up.
Turns out, the system could've totally kept up, but it was too late to change it by the time they found out.
Anon2112 -
11/15/10, 12:09 PM
-
Anonymous said...
-
The accountants in their wisdom, knowing that the govt. with their taxing power loves large numbers, placed the large numbers on the top for prominence and usage.
c.umulus n.imbusi iii -
11/15/10, 12:59 PM
-
Helly said...
-
Very nice up-is-down visual comment on Post-Modernity, Rodge. *clap*clap*clap*
My mother was an accountant. For some reason, she kept a rugged old dinosaur of a mechanical adding machine in the basement. Probably because it cost a fortune in its day.
Her fingers would blur as she touch keyed numbers. I am a solid touch typist, but could never master the number keys. The layout, with a 3-finger home row, never clicked with me.
In the olden days when human ergonomics was second to engineering elegance, somebody naturally thought to align the numerical values of the keys with their elevation—higher is higher.
However in the telephone business, the lowest numerals are most important. For the original AT&T, the center of the universe was area code 201. -
11/15/10, 4:13 PM
-
Anonymous said...
-
Sorry Anon2112, it was Human Factors Engineering and not slowing things down. However, the alphabetic keyboard you show in your link has an interesting Bell System counterpart which was also alphabetic rather than QWERTY. The reason??? If the keyboard had been QWERTY, the telcos would have had to pay their technicians more because they'd have been considered to have typing skills which was another step on the union pay scale. BTW QWERTY was chosen deliberately to slow down typists because of the slow action of early mechanical typewriters. Dvorak is a better keyboard, but will never become popular. We're talking something far beyond Windows versus MACs here.
Helly: mild correction. ATT headquarters were in Manhattan. Bell Labs was headquartered in northern New Jersey. Therefore the three lowest area codes went to Northern New Jersey (201), Washington DC (202), and Manhattan (212). But Manhattan's 212 with the standard 10 pps (pulses per second) rotary dial telephone was the fastest. (211) wasn't used because of the special meaning of x11 (411=information, 611=repair, etc.) to the system. Operators had special dials that pulsed at 20pps. There was an historical research report of which I have a copy that indicated that Bell Labs was the real ruler of the Bell System. We'd develop the stuff, tell Western Electric how much to make, and then tell the telcos how much to buy.
Until the use of dial 1 access to long distance, the makeup of a telephone number was (n0/1x) nnx-xxxx, there n=2 through 9, 0/1 is zero or one, and x is any digit.
Pedantry will end here.
JLW III -
11/15/10, 5:22 PM
-
Anonymous said...
-
The calculator keyboard did indeed exist long before touch tone phones. But the old dial phones associated letters with the numbers (2 = ABC etc), and to maintain that association with the calculator layout would have necessitated a rather upside-down counterintuitive alphabetical layout, no?
CWW -
11/15/10, 5:33 PM
-
Anonymous said...
-
I can tell you while on strike duty{1988?}, and loaned out to Pacific Bell Directory Assistance [What City, please?], they used standard DEC VT100 clones with keys arranged in alphabetical order.
No QWERTY there. The system looked up matching 'names' as you typed in each character, and displayed fewer and fewer matches until you saw the one you wanted. Anyone trained to use that keyboard was ruined for life in touch typing or using a normal QWERTY. The 'supes' would tell you how to sit, no slouching ... and would 'plug into' your station whenever they approached. You had to put up a flag to request use of the restroom, after being given permission. What a horrid occupation, but it allowed a really flexible shift for those who needed one, such as mothers of school age children. Now, they are no longer employed.
I thought the area codes were assigned by city population, with the shortest dial time being assigned to the most populous.
With the assignment of blocks of numbers to the cell phone industry, the NPA-NNX plan that worked so well for so long was destroyed. Now you cannot tell if a 212 number is even in the state of New York, much less NYC. Portability has opened pandora's box, I'd say. Those with criminal intent use phones and then throw them away. We will run out of numbers one day.
tomw -
11/16/10, 12:41 PM
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)