"While France, Germany, and other countries got their early PC with customized keyboards whose layouts mirrored closely the typewriters that came before… [...] …in Poland, we had to find another way of inputting the extra 9 diacritics unique to our language."
Did we? I dare to say that your historical account is inaccurate. We stuck to our traditional layout for a while.
What does it matter if the keyboard wasn't customized in physical sense anyway? You should be looking at the screen, not at the keys. If I recall well, Polish typewriter layout (PN-87) was still available on Windows 95/98. The now prevalent >Alt + something< one was called "programmer's layout", and the name itself indicates that it wasn't originally thought of as everyman's layout.
The typewriter layout finally got extinct, but what spelled its ultimate demise was the internet, I believe.
Early netiquette actually forbid using Polish diacritics, because of encoding issues - in that era you could never be sure whether the other person would read "gwóźdź" or "gw░¶d¶", so it was considered good practice to stick to Latin characters only.
Meaning that users didn't get to feel the pain of having to press Alt + whatever all the time, and so they got hooked on default QWERTY.
As the last of Mohicans, I use the typewriter layout to this very day (for typing in Polish; I alternate), only I had to recreate it myself (using Microsoft Keyboard Layout Editor)*
It allows for much faster typing in compare to these inconvenient right-Alt shortcuts. Swapping Y with Z by itself is a win for a Polish speaker (writer), given that Z is much more common in Polish. While its frequency is at mere 0.07% in English, it reaches 4.9% in Polish, placing it in the top 10. Thus putting it under the weakest finger of all - your left pinky - isn't very considerate.
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* Funnily enough - I'm not flame baiting - when I decided to try Linux, hailed for its customizability, I found out that recreating my favorite layout wasn't as easy. I got lots of advice on various forums, but noone had a simple receipt for me. Admittedly this was few years back.
It allows for much faster typing in compare to these inconvenient right-Alt shortcuts.
This is really interesting.
As a late-comer to Polish (native British), I've only learned on the right-Alt layout, and the typewriter layout initially gave me The Fear just looking at it.
Then I tried to see how quickly I could type Łódź, and yeah, I think you might be right about the pain - the typewriter layout looks like it should work much better.
For what it's worth, I'm an unconventional - yet effective - touch-typer, and use my left ring-finger for both the Z and X keys. Typing my ZŻŹs isn't too painful.
I rarely get to come across non-native speakers, good luck : ) Well, note that repositioning "Z" is not just about the pinky. "Z" is present in common Polish digraphs: "cz", "sz", "rz", all of which are easier to type if "Z" is moved to where "Y" normally is.
Type "Szczecin" (my home city) 10 times, and then "Sycyecin" - that's the feeling you'd get on PN-87 :)
Obviously QWERTY isn't a very good keyboard layout to start with. Putting all the letters of the word TYPEWRITER in the top row (to make it easier for the first salesmen to demonstrate the product) wasn't done with everyday user's convenience in mind, English or otherwise.
Hence all these alternatives, such as the most popular Dvorak layout (but also Colemak and plenty others). Which are, however, optimized for English, so a Polish typist wouldn't probably benefit from switching all that much.
> If I recall well, Polish typewriter layout (PN-87) was still available on Windows 95/98.
It's way worse: it's installed by default up to (at least) Windows 7, along with a silent (no feedback!) Left Alt-Shift shortcut that switches the keyboard layout. Press it unknowingly and BAM - suddenly your diacritics don't work anymore and Y/Z are swapped. Annoys the hell out of an Average User.
PS. I'm not saying that the layout was bad - just that there shouldn't be a magic shortcut for a "break my keyboard now!" feature.
I just checked, and it appears PN-87 is included in the default Ubuntu install as "Polish (qwertz)". For whatever reason many distributions include far fewer keyboard layouts than Ubuntu.
Did we? I dare to say that your historical account is inaccurate. We stuck to our traditional layout for a while. What does it matter if the keyboard wasn't customized in physical sense anyway? You should be looking at the screen, not at the keys. If I recall well, Polish typewriter layout (PN-87) was still available on Windows 95/98. The now prevalent >Alt + something< one was called "programmer's layout", and the name itself indicates that it wasn't originally thought of as everyman's layout.
Domestic software certainly used the typewriter layout - for instance http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAG_%28edytor_tekstu%29, once a very popular word processor for PC, last version released in 1996.
The typewriter layout finally got extinct, but what spelled its ultimate demise was the internet, I believe.
Early netiquette actually forbid using Polish diacritics, because of encoding issues - in that era you could never be sure whether the other person would read "gwóźdź" or "gw░¶d¶", so it was considered good practice to stick to Latin characters only.
Meaning that users didn't get to feel the pain of having to press Alt + whatever all the time, and so they got hooked on default QWERTY.
As the last of Mohicans, I use the typewriter layout to this very day (for typing in Polish; I alternate), only I had to recreate it myself (using Microsoft Keyboard Layout Editor)*
It allows for much faster typing in compare to these inconvenient right-Alt shortcuts. Swapping Y with Z by itself is a win for a Polish speaker (writer), given that Z is much more common in Polish. While its frequency is at mere 0.07% in English, it reaches 4.9% in Polish, placing it in the top 10. Thus putting it under the weakest finger of all - your left pinky - isn't very considerate.
-------
* Funnily enough - I'm not flame baiting - when I decided to try Linux, hailed for its customizability, I found out that recreating my favorite layout wasn't as easy. I got lots of advice on various forums, but noone had a simple receipt for me. Admittedly this was few years back.