FROM THE EARLIEST TYPEWRITER TO THE MOST MODERN COMPUTER KEYBOARD, THERE'S BEEN REMARKABLY LITTLE CHANGE IN OVER A HUNDRED YEARS OF DATA ENTRY-DATA ENTRY STILL REQUIRES THE HUMAN TOUCH.
Modem data entry can be traced back to the confluence of two inventions, the electric punch card tabulator and the typewriter. In 1881, Herman Hollerith invented a punched card device to help analyze the 1890 US census data. His was the first to use electric power to read, count, and sort punched cards with holes that represented data gathered by the census-takers. As a result, the 1890 census processed an amount of data in one year that would have taken nearly ten years of hand tabulating. Herman Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896 to manufacture and distribute his invention. The company was mnamed International Business Machines in 1924.
Hollerith's inspiration came from two sources: trains and looms. From observing a train conductor punch tickets, he hatched the idea of punch caixl-assisted data entry. he used a punch card-driven loom, invented in the early 180Os by a French silk weaver called Joseph-Marie Jacquard, for his tabulation machine. From this prototype, he developed a mechanism that could read the presence or absence of holes in the cards by using spring-mounted nails that passed through the holes to make electrical connections. The finished model was an automatic electrical tabulating machine with a large number of clock-like counters that accumulated the results. By means of switches, operator could instruct the machine to examine each card for certain characteristics, such as profession, gender, marital status, number of children, and so on. When a card was detected that met the specified criteria, an electrically controlled sorting mechanism could gather those cards into a separate container.
In addition to solving the census problem. Hollerith's machines proved themselves to have wide application to statistical tasks; their fundamental principles eventually formed the basis of the development of the digital computer. In fact. IBM's punch card technology was used in computers up until the late 1970s.
EARLY TYPEWRITERS AND THE RISE OF QWERTY
The history of data entry coincides largely with the evolution of the data entry keyboard. One could rightly conclude, then, that the first mass-produced data entry machine was the typewriter. The name "QWERTY" for the typewriter keyboard derives from the first six letters in the alphabet row just below the numeric row at the top. Due to its ubiquity, it is also referred to as the "Universal" keyboard. It was the work of inventor G. L. Sholes. who put together prototypes of the first commercial typewriter in a Milwaukee machine shop back in the 1860's.
The QWERIY layout is in fact different from the serially ordered (a.b.c...) layout designed by Sholes in the late 180Os. An industry myth is that the QWERTY keyboard was invented so that a salesman could handily type the word "typewriter" by placing his fingers on the top row of letter keys. The QWERTY arrangement may allow it. but that is not why Sholes originally made it that way. he based his decision on far more sophisticated principles.
When initially introduced to the public in 1877. the first typewriter users typed with only two Gngcrs. The technique of ten-finger typing is credited to a Mrs. L. V Longley in 1878. Shortly afterwards, the concept of "touch typing" was introduced by Frank E. McGurrin, a federal court clerk in Salt Lake City, in which, by memorizing the keyboard layout, users would type without looking at the keys. This method revealed and accentuated the value of the typewriter at some notable typing competitions, and resulted in continually rising sales of the machines for Sholes' company. The consequent superiority of typing speeds (60-80 wpm at the time) over handwriting speeds (approximately 20 wpm) became a problem as professional typists easily caused the typewriter mechanisms to jam.
There are still those who think that Sholes deliberately designed his keyboard Lo slow down fast typists who would otherwise jam up his sluggish machine. In fact, the truth is just the opposite. Sholes actually reconfigured the inner workings of the typewriter, made up of typebars, to lower the frequency of key jams. His mechanical redesign minimized their number, enabling typists to work the keyboard faster.
Sholes accomplished this with the aid of a letter-pair frequency analysis carried out by educator Amos Densmore, brother of James Densmore, who was Sholes' chief financial backer at the time. Por example, Sholes paid special attention to the most common letter pairs such as "TII" in order to make sure that their lypebars hung at jam-proof distances from one another. His solution did not eliminate the problem altogether, but the new keyboard schema was considered important enough to be included in the patent granted to Sholes in 1878, some years after the machine was being manufactured. Because it reduced key-jamming incidents by speeding up typing rather than slowing it down, Sholes' QWRRTY configuration could rightly be crowned the first "ergonomically-correct" design for a keyboard input device. Despite this historic milestone, the accomplishment was largely ignored when it was introduced to the public.
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