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John Parkinson thinks the world has been tied to an Industrial Age keyboard for long enough.
One of a long line of entrepreneurs and scientists who have been outraged by the seeming illogic of the standard QWERTY keyboard, the 62-year-old electrical engineer is showing off a new, rival keyboard design next month at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
He touted the idea at CES last year, too, but this time, he has actual keyboards that will be released to distributors in February. After years of hunt-and-peck typing, he's convinced that there is room for change and that if he can show the way, bigger companies might follow.
"For the longest time, I thought, like everyone else, there's nothing you can do about QWERTY," Parkinson said. "In the end, some ideas occurred to me, and I decided to do something about it myself."
Like many of those that have come before, Parkinson's New Standard Keyboards are arranged alphabetically but with a twist. Instead of lining up the letters all the way across, he splits the keyboard in two, like most ergonomic keyboards. He then assigns the first half of the alphabet to the left hand and the second half to the right. Credit & More Info here
Turn down the suck...Turn up the 
Basically in the beginning, there were several keyboard layouts, but the two most popular were the Dvorak and the QWERTY. As mentioned above, the QWERTY was designed to INTENTIONALLY slow the typist down! If you notice, of the most popular "Wheel of Fortune" letters; N,S,T,R,L,E only two of them are in the home row. And we have the MOST useful ; key in the home row. What is with the ; key!?! The idiot 
who designed the thing instead of coming up with a way to make his typewriter better, decided to slow us down. One of his selling points which is totally useless is the fact that you can type the word TYPEWRITER entirely in the upper row. WHOOPEE! Unfortunately for us the QWERTY brand sold better and the rest is as they say, history. There was a movement later to bring back the Dvorak but obviously it has failed. The Dvorak is a much more efficient layout in which the fingers are in the "home" (middle) row about 70% of the time. By comparison, I think the QWERTY is close to a third (I'm doing this by memory so I might be a bit off with the numbers.) Anyway, when they used to have typing competitions, the Dvorak typists would always win hands down (literally, they didn't have to move their hands around as much). I believe there is a relatively easy way to set-up your keyboard to the Dvorak layout, although I have never done so, for fear of not being able to type on the more common idiotic keyboard. I'm waiting for the day when a chief engineer sits down and finds a keyboard to exclaim "How quaint", and then tears away. 
Beauty i
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