In computer keyboard and typewriter keyboard the alphabets are arranged in different order. Why?

Question

But in mobilephones it is ABCDEF......Z but in computer keyboards it is ASDFG.... like that. Is there any logic in arranging the keys like this. If so, what is it?

Answer 1

Hi there:

The cell phone keyboard with the typical ABC
is, as one answerer stated, a clone of the Alexander Graham Bell configuration put out by Bell Laboratories, many years ago.
As someone stated, this crude way of using the numbers to
get " words" was a memonic aid, so that "ASH 277" would be easier to remember, than all numbers. Since there were only a few phones, by grouping 3 or 4 numbers into a word, meant you only had to remember the last few digits, so " ROCK " would be the first area code for 999 phone numbers, and you just had to remember the last three digits.
( more Bell Labs trivia - did you know that the # sign is an octothorpe? This is out of a 1967 RED BOOK handbook for Bell Linemen... since then the name has been lost, and no one knows what it is called anymore, not even computer reference guides.... -- and, Alexander Bell wanted a word to sign in on a phone call CLEARLY, and searched around the world for a sound that was easy to recognize - the best he could find was the call for fishermen in foggy weather, who yelled AH - Looo, which reverberated like a fog horn and helped to prevent two sailing ships from hitting each other - He modified it a bit and invented the word " hello ", which never existed in the English language until he had all his operators use it... )

As for the QWERTY layout of the keyboard, here is a previous answer that I gave... your question is asked repeatedly on the ANSWER forum...

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Early typewriters were mechanically crude and the swing arms that
had the letters on the end moved 6 inches or more from a circle around
the center of the page. If two arms reached the same strike slot,
they jammed together, often bending the thin swing arms.

A group of Engineers was given a typewriter by Remmington in New York, to design a jam- proof machine. Instead, the Engineers looked at a data base of the most used and least used
letters of the English alphabet.
They put the most used letters on the LEFT hand, since most people are right handed, and the most used letters on the weakest, least used fingers - note that the letter "A" is on the baby finger on the left hand. The baby finger on the left hand was designated the weakest, most difficult to use finger, while the letter A is always abound across almost all amounts of actual typing.
The ploy worked, and typists who were using the common keyboard of the day, with all the letters in alphabetical order, slowed to an absoute crawl.
Repairs of jammed keys stopped immediately.
DVORAK was designed to improve typing, and " reportedly " quadruples the words per minute.
RAND in England designed a keyboard with two bowls shaped to
fit the human hand natural swing movements, so that the typist
does not "reach" for top row keys and left and right keys, but
moves only the fingers, and unlike the old typewriters, which had
keys that would have to be pressed down against huge springs,
about one to two INCHES, the RAND keyboard had touch-screen like keys, that have no visible movement at all. The words per minute reach 2000, easily, by anyone with a bit of practice.
Today, on a typical computer, programmers and general public are considered " good " if they can do 30 or 60 words per minute.
Secretaries start at 120 words per minute.
Most of the computer people I know still use two fingers, including
some of the fastest and best programmers, following the GIGO rule.
(( Computers use a stack of memory, which programmers fill and recall with numbers, using either FIFO or FILO, First In, First OUT, or First in, Last Out. All early calculators like the HP65 I use, with RPN ( Reverse Polish Notiation) use FILO ). GIGO is a parody of this terminology, with Garbage In = Garbage Out. ie. Typing in huge amounts of poorly written and poorly tested program code, is not as fast as typing in well written, well tested code -- ONCE.))

The typewriter keyboard you are using was deliberately sabottaged
to be the worst, least efficient, most difficult to use device
possible. Today's Engineering at its best...
If someone tells you that 120 words or 160 words a minute is "good"
then they have not heard of the RAND keyboard with 2000 words per minute.
You might try to search the web for Sperry, Rand, REMMINGTON, and keyboards, to see if there is any information on other keyboards.
Dvorak and other keyboards are out there, but never caught on with the general consumer.

NEW ADDITON SINCE LAST POSTED

To sum up pages of reading - this question was asked earlier in the 18,000 questions, and I stumbled on it by accident. I have no idea how to search through all the ANSWERS with keywords... - so There are two links with interesting articles which give a different twist to things:

http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/dvorak/history.h...
http://reason.com/9606/fe.qwerty.shtml...

One answer states that the QWERTY was NOT designed to
slow down the user, ( which it did) but the purpose of the
change was to put the most, and least used letters
beside each other so that a user could not use two
different hands to hit them at the same time - almost the
same as "slowing down" but a slightly more sophisticated
logic. It may be just an argument in semantics. The results appear the same.

The other note is that the supposedly FAST DVORAK keyboard
may be a hoax, and that Dvorak may have tried to
fake the comparison tests to make money on his own
patents. Apparently, all the documents showing an increase in speed refer to US Army tests -- that HE was in charge of doing! ... the articles are online, and you can read them.
They are really interesting.

In any event, the 2000 words per minute on a modern,
electronic RAND keyboard, are real, and I would rather have one of them, if they were available to the public...

Hope this helps answer your question.

robin

Answer 2

Technical history.

The 'qwerty' keyboard is called that due to the letters in left upper part of most keyboards(your asdfg). When mechanical keyboards (the pressure from your fingers forced metal levers to strike a ribbon which imprinted on paper)came into widespread use they suffered from a problem. The metal keys when pressed by experienced typers would collide together and get stuck. The solution was to space the letters most used will those less used.

So even FAST keyers(40 wpm) could key without pausing to unstick keys. This advantage quickly became the standard(yes there used to be AND still are different arrangements). BUT you say they haven't made mechanical typewriters since... they are still used where there is no readily available power sources.

BUT why use the qwerty keyboard? Well for one that's the one 'taught' in schools, thats the one we 'always' used. HOWEVER
even with wpm(words per minute) speeds approaching 100wpm
(it is a lot easier to type with electronic keyboards or zero pressure keyboards) there are OTHER keyboards available.

Keyboard patterns laid out to take advantage of the human mind and hand; Not limited by mechanical restraint pf the machine.
Which means you'll most likely learn the qwerty and also have to learn the newer layouts(and eventually qwerty will disappear- maybe).

Don't take it personally as it could be way worse. Typing in an Indian dialect requires the use of three key combinations to reproduce their entire alphabet!

Answer 3

This is because the typewriter in the past use keyboard in serial order. Then the people type too fast for the typewriter to catch up, letters on the paper get messy. Hence the people invent typewrite with keyboard not arrange in this format to slow down people typing speed. Then when computer is invented, people prefer to type the old way that they used to, so the keyboard order remain the same. Hope this help.:)

Answer 4

The keys on a typewriter are in the order that they are to slow the typist down. On the old typewriters the letters were hammered out onto a ribbon. The hammers would jam together if you typed too fast or if the more commonly used hammers were positioned together. The computer keyboard is that same way because people who already knew how to touch type were used to it.

Another keyboard, the dvorak, was produced to speed up typing but it wasn't adopted by many.

Answer 5

the original typewriter had the keys that way because that was how the inventor arranged them. typing was learned in this style and was in wide use by the time the computer keyboard came about.

Answer 6

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