Tuesday, October 03, 2017

How QWERTY Conquered Keyboards



That title was strangely easy to type. The keyboard layout that we are familiar with, with QWERTY  at the top left, became the default pattern when typewriters became popular. But even then, learning to touch type was a specialized skill. Some people were professional typists, while the rest of us didn't type often enough to question a typewriter's design. Now that everyone types on a personal device, you might wonder why we stick with the same layout. Personally, it just seems like too much trouble to re-learn where the keys are. Vox gives us the history of the familiar keyboard layout, and why we still use it today. (via Geeks Are Sexy)

2 comments:

Gelvan Tullibole 3rd said...

Woah there! Hang on a minute!
There's way more to the world than itsy bitty USA.
AZERTY keyboards outnumber quaint old QWERTY so your 99% is more like 40%.

Miss Cellania said...

Wikipedia disagrees. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout#QWERTY-based_Latin-script_keyboard_layouts