why is the alphabet mixed up on a key board and not in alphabetical order?

Question

who designed it this way?

I can't decide on best answer.
Kokopelli & Boo answers are both equally good.
I have to put it to a vote for number 2 or 3

please choose .... 2 or 3

Answer 1

The QWERTY keyboard, so called for the top row of letters on its left-hand side, was devised to make things easy for the typewriter, not the typist.

In what is generally considered the first practical typewriter--designed by an American inventor named Christopher Sholes and a group of cohorts in the late 1860s--the type, arranged in a sort of circular basket under the carriage, was prone to frequent jamming at typing speeds in excess of hunt-and-peck. (Another problem, by the way, was that type met paper on the underside of the cylinder, so the typist couldn't read the fruits of his or her labors without lifting up the carriage.) To solve the jamming problem, Sholes and company, who had originally arranged their keyboard in alphabetical order, decided to put the most commonly used letters (or what they thought were the most commonly used letters) as far apart as possible in the machine's innards. The next year, 1873, they turned their invention over to the Remington gun company of New York State, and their keyboard has been standard ever since, despite the fact that succeeding improvements in typewriter design quickly rendered it ridiculous.

Of course, a superior system exists. It's called the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, or DSK, after inventor August Dvorak, who developed it while a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. Among other improvements, the DSK puts all vowels in the "home row" of keys--the second row from the bottom--and favors the right hand slightly. Numerous studies have proved that it can be learned quite easily even by experienced typists, and that it makes for faster, less fatiguing, and more accurate typing than the conventional system. But habit, apparently, dies hard in the typing biz--the DSK was patented in 1932.

Answer 2

The qwerty keyboard was designed during the time of the manual typewriter. It was meant to slow down the typist and keep the stems/hammers from getting tangled with each other by moving combinations of letters around and seeing which ones got tangled the most. Something like that. It was meant to give the typist some sort of rhythm. In other words you could't have an actual word like 'the' or 'and' in a row, or the typewriter would jam. For that matter, if it went abcdefg, a child could type at a wild speed and irratic speed..

Answer 3

I always heard that the guy who was building the keyboard dropped it and the keys got all mixed up. I don't know for sure, but I can't imagine how difficult it would be to type in alphabetical order.

Also you might notice that for the most part every other letter in a word uses one side of the keyboard.

Answer 4

Hello eypoppoing hideous female troll,

The keys are designed so that the most commonly used letters are within easy reach of your hand while the least used letters are farther away. There are other keyboards out there, but this actually works the best. You should take a good typing class at your school, or get a typing tutorial program.

--Rick

Answer 5

It was the work of inventor C. L. Sholes, who put together the prototypes of the first commercial typewriter in a Milwaukee machine shop back in the 1860's.
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For years, popular writers have accused Sholes of deliberately arranging his keyboard to slow down fast typists who would otherwise jam up his sluggish machine. In fact, his motives were just the opposite.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Answer 6

It was designed so that unpopular letters, such as "q,w,z,x, and p" would be put in the corners and the more important letters are put towards the middle. If you had it in alphabetical order, then you would rarely use the bottom row.

Answer 7

Because you use some words in sentence more frequently that onthers, so those specified words and in an easy/quick place to type. IT's designed for efficiency. For example:

We use the letters A and S more than Z and X, so A and S are in a more accessable/convient location for typing.

Answer 8

I can't remember the name of the guy, but he did it because the keys (on typewriters) would get jammed up to easily. By using the qwerty system, there were less jams.

Answer 9

they put the letters that you use most often in the middle where you're supposed to put your hands for typing