Keyboards are arranged so that the most common keys are on the home row. This way one can type more efficiently!
There is this keyboard called the DVORAK keyboard, and it's arranged with all the vowels on the home row, and you are supposedly able to type WAY faster because of how the letters are even more efficiently arranged.
Ask Wikipedia who invented the modern keyboard.
2006-07-22 01:12:56
·
answer #1
·
answered by j2of7 2
·
0⤊
0⤋
Keyboards are arranged the way they are for efficiency....in old (the first) mechanical typewriters. It was NOT to slow down typists.
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, 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.
2006-07-22 01:28:58
·
answer #2
·
answered by SuperTech 4
·
0⤊
0⤋
s my dear friend
Frequently used pairs of letters were separated in an attempt to stop the typebars from intertwining and becoming stuck, thus forcing the typist to manually unstick the typebars and also frequently blotting the document[1]. The home row (ASDFGHJKL) of the QWERTY layout is thought to be a remnant of the old alphabetical layout that QWERTY replaced. QWERTY also attempted to alternate keys between hands, allowing one hand to move into position while the other hand strikes home a key. This sped up both the original double-handed hunt-and-peck technique and the later touch typing technique; however, single-handed words such as stewardesses and monopoly show flaws in the alternation.
This French Matra Alice uses the AZERTY layout
Enlarge
This French Matra Alice uses the AZERTY layout
Minor changes to the arrangement are made for other languages; for example, German keyboards add umlauts to the right of "P" and "L", and interchange the "Z" and "Y" keys both because "Z" is a much more common letter than "Y" in German (the letter seldom appearing except in borrowed words), and because "T" and "Z" often appear next to each other in the German language; consequently, they are known as QWERTZ keyboards. French keyboards interchange both "Q" and "W" with "A" and "Z", and move "M" to the right of "L"; they are known as AZERTY keyboards. Italian typewriter keyboards (but not most computer keyboards) use a QZERTY layout where "Z" is swapped with "W" and "M" is at the right of "L". Portuguese keyboards maintain the QWERTY layout but add an extra key: the letter "C" with cedilla (Ç) after the "L" key. In this place, the Spanish version has the letter "N" with tilde (Ñ) and the "Ç" (which is not used in Spanish, but is part of sibling languages like French, Portuguese and Catalan) is placed at the rightmost position of the home line, beyond the diacritical dead keys. Norwegian keyboards inserts "Å" to the right of "P", "Ø" to the right of "L", and "Æ" to the right of "Ø", thus not changing the appearance of the rest of the keyboard. The Danish layout is like the Norwegian, only switching "Æ" and "Ø", and Swedish has their umlaut letters "Ä" and "Ö" in those places. Some keyboards for Lithuanian used a layout known as ĄŽERTY, where "Ą" appears in place of "Q" above "A", Ž in place of "W" above "S", with "Q" and "W" being available either on the far right-hand side or by use of the Alt Gr key.
Hope my collection from wikipedia.org
Musthafa
2006-07-22 01:13:00
·
answer #3
·
answered by contactmusthafa 2
·
0⤊
0⤋
Before keyboards there were typewriters. The typewriter could only handle someone typing but so fast on it to start. A person came up with the arrangement of keys to keep people from typing too fast and making the typewriter malfunction.
Today we don't have to worry about that but, we still use the same kind of keyboard layout because of tradition.
2006-07-22 04:31:48
·
answer #4
·
answered by foofoo 3
·
0⤊
0⤋
We call that QWERTY keyboard, it was developed by christopher sholes. Why it was not arranged in abcd? because sholes arranged the letters according to how frequent they are used in typong words, he also separated the most commonly used letters so that it will be easier to type.
2006-07-22 01:15:11
·
answer #5
·
answered by mike mike 2
·
0⤊
0⤋
The QWERTY keyboard was designed to slow down the typist, when typewriter was mechanical and couldn't keep up with fast typists.
2006-07-22 01:13:01
·
answer #6
·
answered by changmw 6
·
0⤊
0⤋
Check the link below to see why the qwerty was devised!
2006-07-22 01:15:04
·
answer #7
·
answered by Rowdy answers 6
·
0⤊
0⤋
itz bcoz all d words have their own meaning. they r spelled such that they r generating a proper meaning.if words r orderly placed on a keyboard then it will create a problem .......
2006-07-22 01:19:45
·
answer #8
·
answered by Anonymous
·
0⤊
0⤋