Someone invented this nifty thing called a typewriter. It was great. It let people create consistent, tidy documents. Different people came up with different ways of laying out the keys. You could simply put them in alphabetical order (how boring!) or you could get creative and lay them out according to some grand plan. August Dvorak thought that it only made sense to put the keys you used frequently in easy-to-reach places (the home row) and banish the pesky J, Q, and Z to the undusted corners of the bottom row. Sounds like a clever idea. He went one step further and identified common letter order. It's easier to put your fingers down from pinky-to-index than from index-to-pinky (try it) so he made another huge leap of logic to lay out common letter combinations (like "th" and "sn" and "ou") in pinky-to-index order.

Great! We have a keyboard layout that lets your fingers stay mostly in one place and the words just fall out naturally. Boy this Dvorak guy sure is smart, right? Wrong. The old clunker typewriters had each letter on a long lever that snapped up to the page (remember those?) This made for a fine racket when you were typing along, but you'd better not go too fast or the keys stick to the other keys that stick to the other keys that get jammed against the other keys and you have an ink covered gooey tangled mess of smeary typewriter keys. Boy that Dvorak guy sure is dumb! What was he thinking? Letting people type at unnaturally fast speeds... Why, it's criminal!

OK, time to rethink. What's the slowest, most awkward, difficult to use keyboard layout possible?
*much research occurs*
Viola!! We have it!
Well, what shall we name it?
I certainly don't want my name on it.
Me neither. I have my professional reputation to think of!
Alright, let's just name it after its first letters.
Qwerty? Hmm... Qwerty. It has a nice ring to it. I think we can sell this...

The qwerty keyboard was appropriate at one point in time. But at this point, it's an antiquated notion that is still the standard out of sheer inertia. What, you think your computer will freeze up if you type too fast? (OK, I have experienced that, but it always sorts itself out. I didn't have to go in with a screwdriver and un-stick the electron gun.)

If you are happy with qwerty and have no tendonitis/carpal tunnel problems, that's great. I'm happy for you and don't change anything. But if your hands/wrists/forearms give you trouble or if you're just irritated at being slowed down by your silly keyboard layout then try Dvorak. I poked around on the web and found a quite good tutorial. I've been slowly working through the lessons and, after just a month or two, I'm already just as fast as I was on a qwerty and I don't have to look at the keyboard nearly as much. People get up to really blistering speed on Dvorak keyboards, much faster than is physically possible on a qwerty. (An interesting tidbit: World record for typing speed? 170wpm - Dvorak of course.)

At noon on the teahouse Aunt Tess hushes the nauseous host

Yea, that's a pretty ridiculous sentence, but it's typed without moving your fingers from their home keys. With just the easiest eight letters you can make (mildly ridiculous) complete sentences with complete ideas. *rant* *flame* *foam at the mouth*
OK. You get the idea. I'm completely psyched by this Dvorak thingy. (Incidentally, my tendonitis has gone away since I switched layouts.)

Exhibit A - qwerty layout:

QWERTYUIOP[ ]\
ASDFGHJKL;'
ZXCVBNM,./

Exhibit B - Dvorak layout:

',.PYFGCRL/=
AOEUIDHTNS-
;QJKXBMWVZ

A good Dvorak reference.

The above is a dramitization. Albert Dvorak didn't came out with his keyboard layout until decades after Qwerty had become the standard. [an error occurred while processing this directive]