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SEMANTIC ENIGMAS
Why aren't the letters on a computer keyboard in alphabetical order?
Richard Hearty, Newcastle Upon Tyne UK
- Because typists have been trained on Qwerty keyboards since the 1860s and noone can be bothered retraining them.
Ian, London
- The "qwerty" keyboard arrangement stems from mechanical typewriters. The keys are arranged to make fast typing difficult as old typewriters would easily jam. Of course humans being adaptable sorts have learned to overcome this obstructionist system and now (some folks) type faster than they talk, or even think.
R Kenig, London UK
- Because when typing in English (don't know about other languages) you use some characters (such as vowels) far more frequently than others (such as Z or X), and the keyboard is designed to help you reach the most frequently used keys most easily. However, to truly benefit from this you need to learn to touch type and stop looking at the keys and prodding away with one finger. Once you learn to touch type you will wonder how you managed before.
Mary, Glasgow Scotland
- They are arranged randomly because manual typewriters tended to jam if the user typed too fast - therefore the arrangement was intended to slow early typists down. Now, of course, we want to be able to typer faster faster faster, so why change what we're all used to?
Julie F, London
- because fingers do not read from left to right
miche, scotland
- 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
- The arrangement is to seperate letters which frequently occur consecutively in words, to eliminate jamming of manual typewriters.
sue bailey, London UK
- The 'qwerty' keyboard was designed for use on typewriters so that frequently used letters were spread apart, avoiding clashing or jamming of the most used 'hammers'.
It is, of course, completly un-ergonomic, outdated and pretty useless.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!) the levers that hit the ribbon were rather prone to jam or get tangled up with one another if the keys were depressed too quickly - if the typist did her job too well, in other words. The QWERTY keyboard was therefore specifically designed to slow down the process of typing as much as possible. 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 . . .
"The name "QWERTY" for our typewriter keyboard comes from the first six letters in the top alphabet row (the one just below the numbers). It is also called the "Universal" keyboard for rather obvious reasons. It was the work of inventor C. L. Sholes, who put together the prototypes of the first commercial typewriter in a Milwaukee machine shop back in the 1860'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 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. Looking inside his early machine, we can see how he did it.
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 (see drawing), 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.
Sholes and Densmore went to Remington, the arms manufacturer, to have their machines mass-produced. In 1874, the first Type-Writer appeared on the market. No contemporary account complains about the illogical keyboard. In fact, few contemporary accounts even mention the machine at all. At its debut, it was largely ignored.
Sales of the typewriter did not take off until after Remington's second model was introduced in 1878, offering the only major modification to the keyboard as we know it today.
The first machines typed only capital letters. The new Remington No. 2 offered both upper and lower case by adding the familiar shift key. It is called a shift because it actually caused the carriage to shift in position for printing either of two letters on each typebar. Modern electronic machines no longer shift mechanically when the shift key is pressed, but its name remains the same.
In the decades following the original Remington, many alternative keyboards came and went. Then, in 1932, with funds from the Carnegie Foundation, Professor August Dvorak, of Washington State University, set out to develop the ultimate typewriter keyboard once and for all.
Dvorak went beyond Blickensderfer in arranging his letters according to frequency. Dvorak's home row uses all five vowels and the five most common consonants: AOEUIDHTNS. With the vowels on one side and consonants on the other, a rough typing rhythm would be established as each hand would tend to alternate.
With the Dvorak keyboard, a typist can type about 400 of the English language's most common words without ever leaving the home row. The comparable figure on QWERTY is 100 The home row letters on Dvorak do a total of 70% of the work. On QWERTY they do only 32%.
The Dvorak keyboard sounds very good. However, a keyboard need to do more than just "sound" good, and unfortunately, Dvorak has failed to prove itself superior to QWERTY. It appears that many of the studies used to test the effectiveness of Dvorak were flawed. Many were conducted by the good professor himself, creating a conflict of interest question, since he had a financial interest in the venture. A U.S. General Services Administration study of 1953 appears to have been more objective. It found that it really didn't matter what keyboard you used. Good typists type fast, bad typists don't.
It's not surprising, then, that Dvorak has failed to take hold. No one wants to take the time and trouble to learn a new keyboard, especially if it isn't convincingly superior to the old. A few computer programs and special-order daisy wheels are available to transform modern typewriters or word processors to the Dvorak keyboard, but the demand for these products is small. After all, expert typists can can do nearly 100 words a minute with QWERTY . Word processors increase that speed significantly. The gains that Dvorak claims to offer aren't really needed."
Tim, London England
- Keyboards with other layouts are available; usually designed for people who have motor difficulties.
One design has large buttons with the common letters grouped around the space button in the centre.
'Concept keyboards' are flat touchpads which allow a keyboard layout to be completely customised with as many or few areas as desired.
Microwriters have just a few keys and rely on the pattern in which they are pressed to produce letters.
James Buller, London UK
- They did this to put U and I together. ;)
Jacki , Boston, US
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