Will the F keyboard solve all the problems?

The hot topic for the last few days has been the keyboard discussion. The government has decided to support the Turkish F Keyboard against the international Q Keyboard.

The F Keyboard has many supporters from technology leaders to the journalists. So the government has a good chance to pass legislation making it mandatory for the multinational IT giants to produce laptops and all the other IT devices with the F Keyboard. The legislation will mean that Turkey will not be able to reap benefits from economy of scale. This will increase the price of IT products with keyboards sold in Turkey as they will be produced in small numbers and thus it will be harder for the common person to acquire a laptop. Therefore the government should prove that the extra bucks the Turkish people will have to pay will be worth the benefits of switching to an F Keyboard.

There are scientific facts proving that writing with F is faster than writing with Q as the F keyboard has been prepared by a commission under İhsan Sıtkı Yener. The keyboard has been designed to optimize writing speed by placing the most commonly used letters near to the strongest fingers. The Q keyboard however is designed to reduce writing speed. In 1867, Christopher Latham Sholes, the founder of the first writing device, created the Q keyboard to overcome a mechanical bug that happened when people wrote fast. Sholes put the most common letters near the weakest fingers. In the last writing championship Turkish team could write 72 English words in a minute where as the American team could write 35 with the Q keyboard. In short technologically speaking, the F keyboard is better than the Q, even in English.

However in time Q became the standard and couldn’t be changed because of the cost of replacing all the machinery because at the time that it was proposed the digital revolution already took off and there were more than 400,000 devices already in use.

I believe that the choice should be left to the users. Some people who travel a lot would like to stick to the Q because it is the international standard and some would like to use F to type faster more easily.

I believe that the government will go nowhere with this move as it was this government that bought hundreds of thousands of computers to the school all around Turkey. It is a very late move to satisfy right-wing voters. Otherwise who would use the F keyboard if you don’t teach it in the schools?

The debate about the keyboard seems very shallow to me. There are many tougher issues that we have to face in the technology industry.

If the government wants to change things it will have to be more sincere about the motives and definitely have to plan ahead.

ersu.ablak@konakmedya.com