![]() In the Los Angeles Times, Steve Steinburg writes, regarding the adoption of an Internet standard, "t's all too likely to be the wrong standard. An article in the January 1996 Harvard Law Review, for example, invokes the typewriter keyboard as support for a thesis that pure luck is responsible for winners and losers, and that our expectation of survival of the fittest should be replaced by survival of the luckiest.īut this is just the tip of the iceberg. It is commonly reported as fact in newspapers, magazines, and academic journals. ![]() Pick up the February 19 edition of Newsweek and there is Steve Wozniak, the engineering wunderkind largely responsible for Apple's early success, explaining that Apple's recent failures were just another example of a better product losing out to an inferior alternative: "Like the Dvorak keyboard, Apple's superior operating system lost the market-share war." Ignoring for the moment the fact that just about all computer users now use sleek graphical operating systems much like the Mac's graphical interface (itself taken from Xerox), Wozniak cannot be blamed for repeating the keyboard story. ![]() Our story concerns the history of the standard typewriter keyboard, commonly known as QWERTY, and its more recent rival, the Dvorak keyboard. But our concern here is with one such story that is put forward as part of a case against the effectiveness of free markets and individual choice. These fictions may ordinarily be little more than curiosities or mere affronts to our concern for the truth. ![]() Even after they are shown to be false, some stories are repeated, embellished, and occasionally built into entire belief systems. Like a modern horror movie villain who keeps coming back from the dead, a false story can take on a life of its own: Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow, Millard Fillmore ordered the first bathtub for the White House, that sort of thing. ![]()
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