Engelbart's chording system wasn't faster than QWERTY, but chording systems of the stenographic sort are the fastest way to get fingers accurately typing words, allowing over 200-300WPM for mortals. A major source of error with QWERTY is timing. We type "teh" instead of "the" if 'e' lands 1/100th of a second before 'h'. Or we type "THe" when we meant "The" because the Shift key is error prone to hold and release just right.

Piano is known to be very hard but it forgives keys being a few milliseconds off because the ear can't hear if a C-G chord was actually C-3-milliseconds-before-G or G-3-milliseconds-before-C. (The wavelengths of the notes themselves contribute to the latency of the ear precisely determining the order each note was struck.)

So stenographic chording systems help eliminate the error of having to exactly time the ordering of key-up and key-down events. If laptops shipped with steno keyboards they'd be faster and more pleasurable to use but "good enough is the worst enemy of best" I suppose. Shakespeare and Tolstoy didn't need high speed text input systems to write all their masterpieces. Modern computerized systems for writing musical scores haven't given modern society an abundance of Beethovens and Mozarts cranking out works like the 9th Symphony and the Magic Flute at 100 measures per minute.

Funny, as I write this comment my thinking is beginning to evolve to consider that maybe we would be better off using Engelbart's speed limited 40WPM system after all? If the effort to post a comment on political Twitter were higher maybe we'd have higher quality political discussion thereon? If I had to write this HN comment long hand with quill and ink I think I would have been compelled to get my point across with half as many words....

Stenography is weird though. They are typing sounds not words, presumably because there's no opportunity to fully hear, understand, and transcribe words... to be that fast you actually have to cut out comprehension. It's interesting but doesn't feel translatable.

The point wasn't typing speed, the NLS workstations had full keyboards for bulk typing. Where NLS combined with the chording shined was in editing and presentation (look at what they showed in the demo), and the NLS command set design facilitated that.

What I think Engelbart understandably missed is that 1) we are all beginners sometime and 2) we no longer sit in only one app all day so the time efficiency amortization benefit he expected is a bit worse. GUI standards claw back some of the efficiency loss (remember pre CUA?) but don't take you to the levels he was shooting for.