Does the big ring split the gearing?
 

I don't know much about road biking, I ride a fair amount, but don't really know much about it. I have a middle 90's Miyata 714 14 speed bike. It feels like the big front ring, splits the rear gearing. I mean you start out in Low 1 the shift the front ring up so you are in High 1 the shift out of High to Low, and then to 2 so you are now in Low2, then up to HIgh2 and so forth all the way up. If you can make sense of that, is that the way it is?

That is not the right way to shift. The front gears should shift infrequently relative to the rear gears. When you start cycling, pick a gear that is compatible with the conditions. Say, the small ring in front and the middle cog in the back. Then you cycle, as you gain speed you'll shift to a smaller gear in the back, then another smaller one. When you are one before last on the rear gears, you shift to the large gear in the front and a few (3-4) gears lower (towards the bigger cog) in the back. Then as you gain more speed, again shift the rear gears towards the small cog.

Not really, you're thinking of the '70s half-step gearing that was common on touring bikes. Generally you would have the rear-cogs differ by 10% and the front two chainrings would be 5% apart. Then you go back and forth on both.

However, road/racing bikes have much wider spread between the chainrings, typically 20%, so you'd skip 2-3 gears in the back. To find your optimum shift-pattern, go to this site to compute your gear-inches (travel per crank-revolution): http://www.bicyclesource.com/bike/ge...avascript.html

Here's my gearing and the shift-pattern I use:
http://i42.photobucket.com/albums/e3...nosGearing.gif

That was basically how Alpine Gearing worked but advances in the past couple of decades have eliminated the need to do that. Alpine Gearing had 3 front gears with two larger rings nearly the same size. The limited rear gears made this set up useful, however, with the increase of rear gears the need to have a half step difference front chain-rings disappeared. Now you can just change the rear gears for most changes and change the front for a more drastic change.