Who came up with the keyboard layout for computers?

Answer 1

The QWERTY design was patented by Christopher Sholes in 1868 and sold to Remington in 1873, when it first appeared in typewriters.

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
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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 latter 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. Czech keyboards share this arrangement. A similar layout is used on Hungarian keyboards, where the home row is longer than usual, it consists of the keys "ADFGHJKLÉÁŰ" (although the letter "Ű" is sometimes at the end of the number row). 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 and Finnish has their letters "Ä" and "Ö" in those places. Some keyboards for Lithuania use 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.

Answer 2

The QWERTY design was patented by Christopher Sholes in 1868 and sold to Remington in 1873, when it first appeared in typewriters.

The keyboard was layed out this way to slow typists down as with old manual typewriters the bars that came up to strike the page would get jammed if the typing was too fast.

There are layouts available which allow faster typing like the Dvorak keyboard layout.

Answer 3

Originally, when typewriters were invented, people would type so fast that they would break the typewriter. The original layout had the typer using his or her right hand more than left hand, making it easier to type fast and more typewriters broke. So actually, we are somewhat handicapped. And of course they layout the keys in modern keyboards so that our fingers reach each key with ease.

Answer 4

not sure who but its modled after the typerwriter keyboard