Computer keyboards followed this because people are used to it and don't want to relearn typing, whether for a keyboard in alphabetical order or on one of those ones with all the commonly used letters in the easy to reach places. Richard Smeltzer, Hamilton Canada This is a relic from the distant days of typewriters.
The most frequently used letters were evenly spaced across the keyboard in order to reduce the amount of times the printing hammers jammed. Due to the fact that the eras of typewriters and computers overlapped considerably it was probably thought best not to alter the layout of the more modern keyboard, despite the jamming problem no longer existing. Richard, London England Those of you who have used an old mechanical typewriter will remember how typing too fast caused all the keys to stack on top of one another, effectively jamming the machine.
Early typewriters did have the keys in alphabetical order, but it was found that the keys jammed very easily with this arrangement. To prevent it keys were moved around so that the weaker fingers were needed more frequently.
This meant that people typed at a speed which the maching could handle; giving rise to the 'querty' keyboard we find today; or at least if you're English - my keyboard is French and thus 'azerty'. Even without the mechanical difficulties, there would be no logic today in putting the keys in alphabetical order. It would make more sense to have the most commonly used keys next to the strongest fingers.
Experimental keyboards have been produced using this logic and shown to be much faster than 'querty' but the market seems stuck in its ways and not ready to innovate. This was designed deliberately to make typing a slow process, so that the hammers would'nt foul one another.
There is no reason nowadays why the keys should not be in alphabetical order, except that we would all have to relearn the skill. Brian Clayton, Glasgow U. The arrangement is to seperate letters which frequently occur consecutively in words, to eliminate jamming of manual typewriters. It is, of course, completly un-ergonomic, outdated and pretty useless.
Roll on the new standard! Clive, Bristol UK The keys can be in any order you like if you reprogramme them and stick new labels on. Normally they are in typewriter order because million so people have been trained to touch type in that system. Typewriter keys were laid out to minimise the clash of keystrokes when two adjacent letters are struck in quick succession.
There have been many attempts to design a more ergonomic layout - such as Dvorak. Doug Gowan, Hornsey I understand that on the prototype typewriters prototypewriters, if you will!
This would seem to explain why the keys aren't in an intuitive order, such as alphabetically, and why three of the vowels are annoyingly squashed up in the top line. By the time typewriters that could cope with higher speeds, and indeed desktop computers, had been invented, the QWERTY set-up had become the convention, and secretarial schools were making a lot of money out of its inherent difficulty. Although, of course, the alphabet itself is merely a convention Louise, Sheffield UK I found the following answer by simply typing your question into google.
It seems to cover most bases. So why you didn't try that is anyones guess. It is also called the "Universal" keyboard for rather obvious reasons. It was the work of inventor C. Sholes, who put together the prototypes of the first commercial typewriter in a Milwaukee machine shop back in the 's. For years, popular writers have accused Sholes of deliberately arranging his keyboard to slow down fast typists who would otherwise jam up his sluggish machine.
In fact, his motives were just the opposite. When Sholes built his first model in , the keys were arranged alphabetically in two rows. At the time, Milwaukee was a backwoods town. The crude machine shop tools available there could hardly produce a finely-honed instrument that worked with precision.
Yes, the first typewriter was sluggish. Yes, it did clash and jam when someone tried to type with it. But Sholes was able to figure out a way around the problem simply by rearranging the letters. Looking inside his early machine, we can see how he did it.
Issued in , U. Patent No. The deal with Remington proved to be an enormous success. The fate of the keyboard was decided in when the five largest typewriter manufacturers —Remington, Caligraph, Yost, Densmore, and Smith-Premier— merged to form the Union Typewriter Company and agreed to adopt QWERTY as the de facto standard that we know and love today. Typists who learned on their proprietary system would have to stay loyal to the brand, so companies that wanted to hire trained typists had to stock their desks with Remington typewriters.
In a paper, the researchers tracked the evolution of the typewriter keyboard alongside a record of its early professional users. They conclude that the mechanics of the typewriter did not influence the keyboard design. Early adopters and beta-testers included telegraph operators who needed to quickly transcribe messages. However, the operators found the alphabetical arrangement to be confusing and inefficient for translating morse code.
The Kyoto paper suggests that the typewriter keyboard evolved over several years as a direct result of input provided by these telegraph operators.
For example;. Thus S ought to be placed near by both Z and E on the keyboard for Morse receivers to type them quickly by the same reason C ought to be placed near by IE. But, in fact, C was more often confused with S. In this scenario, the typist came before the keyboard. The Kyoto paper also cites the Morse lineage to further debunk the theory that Sholes wanted to protect his machine from jamming by rearranged the keys with the specific intent to slow down typists:.
If Sholes really arranged the keyboard to slow down the operator, the operator became unable to catch up the Morse sender. Although he sold his designs to Remington early on, he continued to invent improvements and alternatives to the typewriter for the rest of his life, including several keyboard layouts that he determined to be more efficient, such as the following patent, filed by Sholes in , a year before he died, and issued posthumously:.
The calling card of the personal computer was the keyboard, and now, we are carrying around pieces of glass on which we simulate the old QWERTY design. Are we going to keep that layout going? But if not, how might a new design develop? Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword. Sign In Subscribe. The researchers tracked the evolution of the typewriter keyboard alongside a record of its early professional users.
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