Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Why QWERTY keyboard?

I had always wondered, but never discovered until today why the keyboard is laid out in this wierd way. It appears that this keyboard layout was designed by Scholes so as to slow typing speed. The initial model has a mechanical problem caused by people typing fast and hence the keybaord was laid out in such a way that our fingers would have to travel maximum distance.

Isn't it stupid that computers use the same layout when no such mechanical problems canever exist?

Read more about this at How Stuff Works and Wikipedia.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

And trains of today use the same wheel space as the Roman chariots had 2000 years ago.

Technically, it wasn't to slow down typing, but rather to speed the system up to accomodate faster typers. In the qwerty system, commonly used letters which appeared together often such as "TH" were spaced far enough apart as to lessen the chance of the mechanical arms to jam. Regardless, today's world uses less and less mechanics rendering the qwerty system unnesseary other than the fact that I would hesitate to learn a new system when I can already type fast enough with it.

Varun said...

it was done to prevent the jammin of the teeths due to fast typing got that at a quiz!!!!

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