Das Keyboard

Lore & Background

The first iteration of Das Keyboard, released in 2005, did not feature mechanical key switches but had a Model-M-inspired design and keys with individual weights requiring varying force to press. The second iteration in 2006 introduced mechanical key switches using Cherry MX Blue switches. The third iteration in 2008 was the first offered in both Ultimate (unlabeled) and Professional (labeled) versions, featuring six-key rollover, an internal two-port USB hub, and a glossy surface. It later became known that key transposition errors could occur at high typing speeds, and interoperability issues related to the USB hub and lack of power were noticed with some systems. The 'Das Keyboard Model S' was introduced in late 2009 with revised electronics to address common complaints, supporting media keys and PS/2 operation. It shipped in Ultimate and Professional versions, plus a labeled Professional Silent model with non-clicky MX brown stem keyswitches for lower noise. In 2015, some versions began shipping with Cherry MX clone switches manufactured by Greetech. The "Das Keyboard 4" for Windows continues to be sold with Cherry MX switches, but the Mac version and the "Das Keyboard 4C" models all feature the clone switches instead.

Reader's Guide

Das Keyboard's significance lies in its focus on touch typing through blank keycaps, a design choice that distinguishes it from most consumer keyboards. The series evolved from a non-mechanical first iteration to adopting Cherry MX switches, then later incorporating Greetech clone switches. The introduction of the Ultimate and Professional variants in 2008 established a pattern of offering both unlabeled and labeled versions for different user preferences. The Model S addressed earlier technical issues like key transposition errors and USB hub problems, while the Professional Silent model catered to noise-sensitive environments. The Das Keyboard 5Q's cloud-connected concept was ambitious but faced significant delays and platform limitations, with only Windows support despite promised cross-platform compatibility. The series' legacy includes its role in popularizing mechanical keyboards for typing improvement, though its later iterations reflect industry trends toward customization and connectivity.

Did You Know?

• The first Das Keyboard iteration in 2005 did not use mechanical key switches.
• The 'Ultimate' models have blank keycaps designed to improve touch typing skills.
• The Das Keyboard 5Q was introduced on Kickstarter in June 2016 and faced a delivery delay of over a year.
• The open source project DieFarbe attempts to implement the Das Keyboard 5Q driver's feature set for non-Windows operating systems.

The Mind Behind the Keys

August Dvorak was not a typist or a mechanical engineer—he was an educational psychologist and professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. His path toward redesigning the keyboard began in an unexpected place: advising a graduate student named Gertrude Ford on her master's thesis about typing errors. Watching her research, Dvorak reached a sharp conclusion that the QWERTY arrangement, introduced in 1874, had never been engineered with speed or comfort as its guiding goal. He recruited his brother-in-law William Dealey, an education professor at North Texas State Teacher's College in Denton, Texas, to join the effort. Their research was methodical and time-consuming. Dealey attended seminars on the science of motion in 1914 and 1915, and the two later reviewed slow-motion footage of typists at work. They pored over English letter frequencies, common letter pairings, and the physical mechanics of the human hand. The fruit of that labor was the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, completed in 1932 and formally patented in 1936 under U.S. Patent 2,040,248.

The Architecture of Efficiency

The Dvorak layout rests on a set of interlocking design principles that treat the keyboard as a problem in ergonomics and statistics. First, typing should alternate between hands to create a natural rhythm, reduce fatigue, and lower error rates. Second, the most frequently used letters and letter pairs belong on the home row, where fingers rest, and beneath the strongest digits. In practice, roughly 70 percent of strokes on Dvorak land on the home row, compared with only 32 percent on QWERTY, where 52 percent of typing falls on the top row. Third, the rarest letters are pushed to the bottom row, the hardest to reach. Fourth, because most typists are right-handed, the right hand should carry a heavier share of the workload. Additional rules forbid assigning common bigrams to adjacent fingers and encourage an inboard stroke flow, where fingers move from the outer edges of the board toward the center. Vowels and the most-used symbols sit on the left side of the home row, while the most-used consonants occupy the right. The layout was calibrated specifically for English letter frequencies, and its home row—AOEUIDHTNS—echoes the DHIATENSOR arrangement George Blickensderfer identified in 1893, with R swapped for U and the vowels shifted leftward.

The Long Shadow of QWERTY

Despite its scientific pedigree, Dvorak never dethroned QWERTY as the dominant layout worldwide. The most commonly cited reasons are straightforward: QWERTY had already been in widespread use for roughly sixty years before Dvorak's design was completed, and the performance gap between the two layouts is both contested and, by most measures, modest. Nevertheless, Dvorak earned a quiet but durable place in the computing world. In 1982, the American National Standards Institute formally recognized it as an alternate standard arrangement for alphanumeric machines, a designation that traces back to earlier ANSI documents. The original layout was even offered as a factory option on the IBM Selectric typewriter. Today, every major operating system—Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, ChromeOS, and BSD—ships with a built-in Dvorak option, and the layout can be mapped onto any physical keyboard regardless of the characters printed on the key caps. For typists who find QWERTY's awkward finger crossings and left-hand-heavy workload uncomfortable, Dvorak remains a fully supported, one-menu-switch alternative, a testament to the idea that a layout designed in a 1930s university office can still matter in a 2020s smartphone.

Proving It in the Arena

Dvorak did not stop at theory; he put his layout to the test in real-world settings. In 1933 he began entering typists trained on his keyboard into the International Commercial Schools Contest, a series of professional and amateur typing competitions sponsored by typewriter manufacturers, where the professional division featured typists backed by the companies whose machines they were advertising. A more ambitious trial came in the 1930s in Tacoma, Washington, where the local school district ran an experimental typing program built around Dvorak's design. Nearly 2,700 high school students went through Dvorak-based classes, and the results showed they reached proficiency in roughly one-third the time required to learn QWERTY. The experiment's fate, however, was decided by politics rather than performance: a newly elected school board chose to end the Dvorak classes. Dvorak's testing did not stop there. During World War II, while serving in the Navy, he conducted further experiments to evaluate typing performance under military conditions, extending the inquiry into whether the layout's ergonomic advantages held up in the high-pressure, high-volume environments of wartime communications.