Why keyboard letters are not in alphabetical order

• Writing by Rajveer
• On March 24th, 2008 at 5:05 am

It is a very common question your friends can ask you anytime. When someone invented the typewriter, why didn’t he put the A-Z keys in sequence? I believe it is certainly an obvious question for any computer/type writer noob. Infect when I started with my hands on computer keyboard, even I had this question. Lets find it out -

Logic behind the reason

Initially in 1860s, the characters on the typewriters were arranged in alphabetical order. At that time a typewriter use to work using a set on the end of a metal bar which strikes the paper when its key was pressed. However, this procedure was not at all compatible to type faster. Still an operator had learned to type at speed by facing lot complications. Letters that placed close together on the keyboard became tangled with one another, forcing the typist to manually unstick the type bars. This also caused staining the document frequently and jams in typewriter machine. A business associate suggested using nice trick by splitting most commonly keys to speed up typing, so that they also don’t get tangled very often. Rearrangement of keys introduced the word QWERTY, the most commonly used modern-day keyboard layout.

QWERTY keyboard layout

QWERTY is designed for English language. By all means the purpose was to rearrange the keys that were expected to be used in quick sequence were less expected to hold up with each other. The top row was planned to have all the letters for the word ‘typewriter’ hence a typist can easily type the most common words like ‘typewriter’ more quickly.

QWERTY was designed after spending a lot of time on research allowing one hand to move into position while the other hand strikes a key. Thousands of English words can be spelled using only the left hand and right hand separately. And therefore an unfortunate consequence of the layout goes to right-handed typists because more English words can be spelled using only the left hand. QWERTY layout is helpful for those who use their right hand primarily for the mouse leaving the left hand type.

Arrangement of keys under QWERTY layout may not sound completely sensible to many of us today as we are now many decades ahead to that time.

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4 Responses

1. Monti June 30th, 2008 at 10:26 pm

   Dude! I must say that even I landed up to your page from Google after my friend raised the same question. I had the idea but could not explain with facts and history. Now I think could this layout be more better…

2. RAHUL SHARMA August 21st, 2008 at 7:35 am

   it was arranged in order previously but people were typing so fast that the company people were afraid that the keyboard would break……

3. Avantika August 26th, 2008 at 12:19 am

   hey u knw even i did’nt the reason behind this earlier…

4. Lee October 22nd, 2008 at 4:12 pm

   There’s nothing to stop anyone switching to Dvorak - it’s just a configuration change.
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard
   http://www.gigliwood.com/abcd/abcd.html

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