Sunday, June 3, 2007

Story of QWERTY

This interesting bit of info--I read from http://www.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html

"Do you know that story? Why the standard arrangement of keys on typewriter keyboards (and by extension computer keyboards) has QWERTYUIOP along the top line? That was not the original arrangement of typewriter keys. It was designed for a purpose, namely to slow typists down. The problem was that the expertise of the early typists quickly outran the capabilities of the early mechanical typewriters: a fast typist could jam the keys, hitting them faster than they could return after striking the ribbon. QWERTY distributed the keys so they couldn't go so fast. This is clearly a crazy arrangement for the keys on an electronic keyboard, but it's too late to change: QWERTY is standard, and all attempts to rationalize the keyboard have failed in the face of that reality."

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