Why are the letter keys on the keyboard scattered around?

Question

It's like they just threw them on there.

Answer 1

It's not. It's QWERTY.

Answer 2

It's a myth. Keyboards don't exist. Just silly tradition.

Sorry. You asked this in the R&S section so I thought that was how I was supposed to respond. It is actually a lot like religion, it is tradition. Old keyboards were manual and had arms that would jam up against each other if two keys (arms) that were close together went up just right. Putting common keys away from each other would prevent this.

Answer 3

Originally, the characters on the typewriters he invented were arranged alphabetically, set on the end of a metal bar which struck the paper when its key was pressed. However, once an operator had learned to type at speed, the bars attached to letters that lay close together on the keyboard became entangled with one another, forcing the typist to manually unstick the typebars, and also frequently blotting the document. A business associate of Sholes, James Densmore, suggested splitting up keys for letters commonly used together to speed up typing by preventing common pairs of typebars from striking the platen at the same time and sticking together.

Answer 4

Actually, before the computer keyboard, was the typewriter, and this was how the
keys were arranged. So when computers came in, they didn't want to change them,
because all those secretaries who would now use the computer keyboard would have been lost. I was one of them; we learned in high school business classes, how to type on a typewriter. We had to
be faster than 90 wpm when we graduated;
When computer keyboards came out, if
they changed the keyboard, we all would have been able to type about 6 words per minute, get it???? It would have been
terrible, and i'm sure that not one business person would have agreed to computerize their office, if it meant their secretaries could no longer type.

Answer 5

The letters on the 19th Century keyboard (QWERTY) were spread around to slow you down so the type bars would not jam.

The letters on the 20th Century Dvorak keyboard were spread the way they are so you can type faster, based upon the frequency of letter use.

No one has invented a 21st Century keyboard yet....

Answer 6

I heard they put them that way because people were typing too fast and jamming the keys. You know, when they had those tedious manual typewriters, I guess.
They are not exactly random. I,J,K,L,M,N,O, and P are all grouped together, though they are out of order. C, D, E, F,G, and H, are to the left of the aforementioned letters.

Answer 7

Because when typewriters were first invented, quick typists used to get the hammers tangled together. They spread out the keys to stop this from happening.

In other countries (like Germany) different letters are in different places (like the y and the zed).

Answer 8

The 'home keys', the 8 keys on the centre row of letters ( A,S,D,F and J,K,L,; ) are the starting point for your fingers. If you put the fingers of both hands along them, the rest of the keys are arranged to give easiest access for both sets of fingers without having to greatly move your hands.

Answer 9

Commonly used letters are spread out so that typewriters don't jam. There are different keyboard layouts that you can get which allow you to type faster (since computer keyboards don't jam) but they're not very popular.

Answer 10

Actually, they were specifically designed that way to slow down typing. If someone typed too quickly with the original typewriters, the keys would jam.

Answer 11

Because if they were stacked on top of each other, we'd have to learn how to read vertically and 3 dimensionally.