August Dvorak and William Dealey invented the layout in 1936 after studying the deficiencies of the QWERTY typewriter keyboard, which was already 60 years old at that point.It included a special "Keyboard" button that would swap the layout between QWERTY and Dvorak logically, but the physical keycaps would need to be re-arranged to match if you needed a label reference.Interestingly, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak ("Woz") learned Dvorak around 1993 and never looked back (he wasn't involved with Dvorak on the Apple IIc, he says).My son had already switched over successfully, and learned Dvorak in a short time and quickly got up to the same speed he typed in QWERTY in about a week."It's worth noting that Dvorak's purported speed improvements come from using 10 fingers to type, so if you're just learning Dvorak, you might not see any speed improvements over QWERTY when typing with two fingers, such as your thumbs."