As the original typewriters were mechanically slower than a reasonably quick typist the keys were arranged to slow the typist down. Hence the common letters, a, s and e are used by the third and fourth finger of the left hand. Columb Healy, Staining Lancs Because typists have been trained on Qwerty keyboards since the s and noone can be bothered retraining them.
Sholes, came up with a layout that suoted the unwieldy mechanical instrument of the type. There is also a rumour that the word "typewriter" coule be typed quickly since all the letters were on one row. Eoin C. The logic of the qwerty layout was based on letter usage in English rather than letter postion in the alphabet. Peter Brooke, Kinmuck Scotland 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 The keys on a qwerty board were designed when typewriters were mechanically driven, secretaries at the time were apparently so efficient that the arms carrying the characters and attached to the keys often got entangled, requiring the ministrations of an expensive engineer.
The answer, put them where you least expect them! Fiona Bell, Nuneaton Warwickshire This is an easy one. The qwerty typewriter keyboard was designed to keep letters commonly used together away from each other to prevent jamming. Computer keyboards followed this because people are used to it and don't want to relearn typing, whether for a keyboard in alphabetical order or on one of those ones with all the commonly used letters in the easy to reach places.
Richard Smeltzer, Hamilton Canada 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 Those of you who have used an old mechanical typewriter will remember how typing too fast caused all the keys to stack on top of one another, effectively jamming the machine.
Early typewriters did have the keys in alphabetical order, but it was found that the keys jammed very easily with this arrangement. To prevent it keys were moved around so that the weaker fingers were needed more frequently.
This meant that people typed at a speed which the maching could handle; giving rise to the 'querty' keyboard we find today; or at least if you're English - my keyboard is French and thus 'azerty'.
Even without the mechanical difficulties, there would be no logic today in putting the keys in alphabetical order. It would make more sense to have the most commonly used keys next to the strongest fingers. Experimental keyboards have been produced using this logic and shown to be much faster than 'querty' but the market seems stuck in its ways and not ready to innovate.
This was designed deliberately to make typing a slow process, so that the hammers would'nt foul one another. There is no reason nowadays why the keys should not be in alphabetical order, except that we would all have to relearn the skill.
Brian Clayton, Glasgow U. The arrangement is to seperate letters which frequently occur consecutively in words, to eliminate jamming of manual typewriters. 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. All vowels are under the left hands while consonants are under the right. Hand pressure becomes balanced. It gave a chance to return the alphabetic order layout. However, people who worked with typewriters now would have to get accustomed to the new arrangement. In pre-computers era students were not required to do their homework with typewriters, they did everything by hand. The main reason is that typewriters were rather expensive and not so common as, for example, laptops are today.
So major part of students body had no access to this automatized substitute of hand writing. But, hey, everyday is not Sunday, and teachers had also adopted latest technological achievements in their anti-cheating measures. Skip to content Assignments Done. QWERTY Typewriter manufacturers decided to invent a keyboard with neighboring letters separated from each other so that they could be far enough for index finger as previously people printed with first fingers only instead of using ten finger method.
Share via: 1 Share. We use computers to increase productivity at the workplace, we use the computer to connect to the internet, we use the computer to store huge amount of data, we use computers to organize the data and much more. To work on the computer, we have to use the keyboard. When we see the keys of the keyboard, a question comes to our mind that why keys on a keyboard are not arranged in alphabetical order. Here, we will try to get the answer to this question.
To find the answer to this question, we have to date back to the manual typewriters. At the time of the invention of the keyboard, the keys were arranged in the alphabetical order. Therefore, the person who had invented the keyboard created the QWERTY design of the keyword to slow down the speed of the typists.
He had arranged the keys at hard to reach spots to slow down the speed of the typists. After knowing the problem that was associated with the alphabetical order of the keyboard, Christopher Latham Sholes struggled for five years to create the perfect design of his invention.
During these five years, he had made lots of trial and error arrangements of the alphabetical arrangement of the keyboard. James Densmore was the business associate of the Sholes. In , he had sold the manufacturing rights of this Type-Writer to the E. Remington and Sons.
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