who designed the keyboard? and why did they design it the way it is?

Question

who was the one that designed the keyboard and why did they do it like that?? hope this makes sence

Answer 1

In 1867, Christopher Latham Sholes, a Milwaukee printer, filed a patent application for a mechanical writing machine. Unlike the manual typewriters you may remember from your youth, his machine had its typebars on the bottom, striking upward to leave an impression on the paper. This arrangement had two serious drawbacks. First, because the printing point was underneath the paper carriage, it was invisible to the typist. Second, if a typebar became jammed, it too, remained invisible to the operator. Sholes worked for the next six years to try to eliminate this problem, trying mechanical changes and different keyboard arrangements.

In 1873, E. Remington & Sons licensed the design from Scholes, and set their engineers to work to on the design. One of their keyboard layout changes was driven by a clever marketing idea. The Remington brand name, TYPE WRITER, could be most speedily typed if all of its letters were on the same row. Remington's salesmen used this slight bit of subterfuge to impress potential customers.

Competing designs continued to be introduced over the next six decades that solved the mechanical jamming problem, and enabled faster typing. These designs ranged from the so-called "Ideal" keyboard, which placed the most commonly used letters of the alphabet -- DHIATENSOR -- in the home row (circa 1880), to the more well-known Dvorak keyboard, patented in 1932.

How much better were these other designs? During the second World War, the US Navy conducted experiments and discovered that the Dvorak layout increased typing productivity so significantly, that the payback time to retrain a group of typists was only ten days! But these designs were never successful in the marketplace.

Why would firms consistently buy an inferior product? The answer lies not in the device, but in the context of how the devices were employed. Typewriters by themselves, are unproductive objects. Their productive employment requires the presence of a skilled operator - the typist. In the late 1880's, the practice of "touch typing" (where you don't cheat and look at your fingers) was developed. And it was developed for the Remington keyboard. So while competing typewriter designers were heralding their advantages to potential typewriter purchasers, the typists were learning how to use the Remington QWERTY keyboard.

Economists describe the outcome of situations like this with terms like "system scale economies," "entry barriers," and "quasi-irreversibility of investment." Most of us would describe it more simply as:

Answer 2

Christopher Latham Sholes in 1868.

"The action of the type bars in the early typewriters were very sluggish and tended to jam frequently. To fix this problem, Sholes obtained a list of the most common letters used in English, and rearranged his keyboard from an alphabetic arrangement to one in which the most common pairs of letters were spread fairly far apart on the keyboard. Because typists at that time used the "hunt and peck" method, Sholes' arrangement increased the time it took for the typists to hit the keys for common two letter combinations enough to ensure that each type bar had enough time to fall back into place before the next one came up. Sholes had never imagined that typing would ever be faster than handwriting, which is usually 20 words per minute (WPM) or less. This new arrangement was named the Sholes QWERTY keyboard and is still used today."

Answer 3

The basic keyboard layout comes from the very early days of typewriters. For those not familiar with the term, a typewriter is something like a printer, but doesn't require electricity, USB ports, Ethernet ports, license agreements or operating systems. The early typewriters had a fair amount of mechanical linkages which would get in the way of themselves. The layout was chosen to slow down typists to avoid the mechanical jams.

Answer 4

qwerty it is the original design of a type writer or key board, not sure who designer it. I think it is suppose to help to lessen finger and wrist strain when doing allot of typing (secretaries) not just lazy people who sit at the computer for hours!

Answer 5

Look up in Yahoo/Google
HISTORY KEYBOARD DESIGN
and you will find your answer.