Keyboard Question
Why is our keyboards "QWERTY" and not "ABCDE" ?
Labels: thinktank
posted by Rajesh Lal at
2:18 PM
Monday, February 9, 2009
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10 Comments:
Frequently-used pairs of letters were separated in an attempt to stop the typebars from intertwining and becoming stuck.
typewriters kept getting stuck because letters in the alphabet next to eachother were commonly used in words so they mixed it up a bit.
The typewriter answer is correct but it is also when the hands are at rest over the keys the idea was that arranging them in this specific order would allow for maximum speed typing with as little movement as possible. Less used keys are on the outside while more frequently used keys are in the middle.
Actually, the layout was chosen to SLOW DOWN the typing speed in an attempt to prevent the type bars from getting stuck...
I mean, how else would J rate being under the right index finger? DVORAK and other keyboards were some attempts to fix this but never caught on.
Could all be an Urban Legend though...
Interesting enough, just about everyone is correct in many respects. It seems odd, but the 0 and 1 (zero and one) were not on the keyboard until the 1970's. The lower case L and the upper case o were used until computers needed them.
The name "QWERTY" for our typewriter keyboard comes from the first six letters in the top alphabet row. When Sholes built his first model in 1868, 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. The first typewriter had its letters on the end of rods called "typebars." The typebars hung in a circle. The roller which held the paper sat over this circle, and when a key was pressed, a typebar would swing up to hit the paper from underneath. If two typebars were near each other in the circle, they would tend to clash into each other when typed in succession. So, Sholes figured he had to take the most common letter pairs such as "TH" and make sure their typebars hung at safe distances. He did this using a study of letter-pair frequency prepared by educator Amos Densmore, brother of James Densmore, who was Sholes' chief financial backer. The QWERTY keyboard itself was determined by the existing mechanical linkages of the typebars inside the machine to the keys on the outside. Sholes' solution did not eliminate the problem completely, but it was greatly reduced. The keyboard arrangement was considered important enough to be included on Sholes' patent granted in 1878, some years after the machine was into production. QWERTY's effect, by reducing those annoying clashes, was to speed up typing rather than slow it down.
hey ronald ur actually right but way to make a term paper out of it
When the typewriter was first invented, the first letters were assigned to be "QWERTY", but only in our universe. Other strange configurations were assisgned in 41 different universies, but oddly enough, no one chose "ABCDEF" any any of the almost infinity universes.
Deep Thoughts
ehm
what about AZERTY on Belgian (Flemish) keyboards ?
Ragnot
I agree with you
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