Firstly, what is QWERTY? QWERTY is the term used to describe our current standard layout for keyboards. This term was chosen because the keys are laid out where the first letters are Q, W, E, R, T, and Y. Just gaze downward and take a look if you don't believe me.With that out of the way, lets press on the main point of this post. Why QWERTY?
Why are keyboards laid out the way they are? Does it make sense? Is there any reason for it? Who designed it? These are all important questions that many people wonder about.
The short answer is, no, the QWERTY keyboard doesn't make sense, nor is it more efficient than alternative layouts. So now you're probably wondering, "well, then why do we use it?" The idea is a simple and famous one... the early bird catches the worm. The QWERTY was the first keyboard layout created, and because of that, it will probably be the last.
C. L. Sholes created the QWERTY layout in the 1860's. He was building a prototype for the first commercial typewriter. Until this point, writers had accused Sholes of making his typewriters in a way that made people type slowly. If people were to try typing fast on them, they would jam up and need to be fixed.
The original model had two rows of letters arranged alphabetically. QWERTY has three rows of what seems to be an illogical mess of letter placement. What was Sholes thinking?
Well, the way a typewriter worked was by the use of "typebars." These bars hung in a circle. When buttons were pressed, these typebars would fling towards the center of the circle, where the paper was, hit the paper, and leave a letter. In order to avoid the issue of typebars getting jammed, Sholes designed a layout that would separate letters that were commonly used in sequence. He did this by placing their typebars at safe distances from each other. T and H would be good examples of this. While the new layout helped a lot with avoiding jams, it still wasn't perfect, but hey, it worked. People stopped complaining.
And so the QWERTY was born. People didn't really complain about the illogical layout. Over time, they learned to use it. It became the norm. In 1932, some people decided the QWERTY was too illogical and inefficient. They decided to try and make a change. From this, a new layout was created by Professor August Dvorak, called the Dvorak keyboard (go figure).
The Dvorak keyboard never really took off, though the design was said to be much more efficient. Unfortunately, its superiority was never proven and people did not want to re-learn how to type. You can still enable it in Windows if you wanna try, but I don't advise it.
If you learn how to use a QWERTY, I fell like you can type just as fast as you could if you learned another keyboard layout. Fast typers will be fast, and slow ones will be slow (and annoying to talk to via instant messaging). That's just my take on it. Either way, now you know "why QWERTY."
Source - Consider QWERTY...
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