Keyboard layout why qwerty

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 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 , 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 , offering the only major modification to the keyboard as we know it today.

The first machines typed only capital letters. The new Remington No. 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 , 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. 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 of the English language's most common words without ever leaving the home row. The Dvorak keyboard sounds very good.

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. General Services Administration study of 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. Word processors increase that speed significantly. The gains that Dvorak claims to offer aren't really needed. There are even theories on the internet that suggest that the QWERTY layout has a secret hidden purpose, or that it was designed to ensure that people work at a certain rate. However, in reality, the reason for the QWERTY layout on keyboards has an interesting and somewhat controversial history.

There are, in fact, several logical explanations for the way it was designed. Sholes developed a number of devices to make his businesses more efficient. One such invention was an early typewriter, developed along with with Samuel W. This early typewriter used a keyboard that resembled a piano and had 28 keys arranged alphabetically. The idea was that this was the most efficient arrangement because users would know immediately where to find each letter.

The first piano-based keyboard layout developed by Sholes. Sholes received a patent for this typewriter in , but he kept tinkering with the keyboard layout to find the most efficient way to organize the keys. In the prototype, he arranged all the typing letters in four rows. Numbers from 0 to 9 were placed in the top row followed by vowels and punctuation marks in the second row. The typewriter was just too new of an instrument for anyone to imagine memorization of the keyboard layout.

It was not unknown to Sholes that these were the most popular key parings when both combinations were added together. It has been argued that he got the educator and brother of his early partner, Amos Densmore to prepare a frequency study of letter-pairs in the English language using the Bigram Frequency of usage technique.

But this turns out to not quite correct with history. Densmore was not an educator the in 's when it was suggested he conducted this study.

He owned the Densmore Oil Company and manufactured train cars for transporting petroleum and did not have time or resources to conduct this research.

Finally, the obvious and logical sequential alphabetical placement of the keys actually are spaced almost as well as QWERTY for key striker lock up, yet Sholes abandoned this layout as he abandoned others.

Thus we are left with a conflict. Some argue the QWERTY layout was a compromise between the mechanical needs of the typewriter and the needs of the typist to have common letters under fingers.

Most certainly Sholes was mindful of the placement of the keys on his keyboard from a mechanical standpoint to minimize potential key striker lockup, but he was also looking for an edge that may very well reach beyond engineering. Sholes did not have the resources to manufacture typewriters at the scale he had hoped the market would demand as the industrial revolution was predicted to create a torrent of typewritten pages. He needed a manufacturing partner. That partner was the E. Remington and Sons [5] that had began making guns and rifles and moved to sewing machines.

Sholes stayed on with Remington for a while and met the marketing men, William O. Wykoff, Clarence W. Seamans and Henry H. They saw the problem from a perspective that no other typewriter company saw.

They saw it as an education issue that could allow the company to command large shares of the market. With the release of Remington typewriter No. As soon as Model No. Model No. The YWCA was a place where women were able to learn a new trade for the expanding office and secretarial job market. This memorization piece had an incredible effect on the typist. It also allowed the typewriter to mechanically have a higher slope angle of Model No. Those so trained would find it almost impossible to use any other keyboard layout.

They posited that it requires about hours of practice to achieve the reflexes to become a skilled typist and another to be an expert with touch typing using the home keys method, which as far as the research goes, is the fastest technique. 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:.

August Dvorak in the s. More recent research has debunked any claims that Dvorak is more efficient, but it hardly matters. Even in it was already too late for a new system to gain a foothold. It had become truly ubiquitous in countries that used the Latin alphabet. And this why the new KALQ proposal is so interesting. It attempts to break from the tyranny of Christopher Latham Sholes, whose QWERTY system makes even less sense on the virtual keyboards of tablets and smartphones than it does on a computer keyboards.

Is the new KALQ system any different? In some ways, the answer is obviously yes. It has been designed around a very specific, very modern behavior — typing with thumbs. But it could still be argued that the KALQ system, or any similar system that may be developed in the future, is also a product of path dependency. Because no matter how the letters are arranged, they basic notion of individually separated letters distributed across a grid dates back to Sholes and co.