QWERTY

Check your keypad. See how the letters are arranged. Do you see any logic or any pattern the alphabets are arranged in the keyboard. Just wonder a while and figure out if you can.

The keyboards on the laptop/desktop are copied from the typewriter keyboards. The first type writer was invented in 1860's.

Remember how a type writer looks. Each key on the type writer is associated with a bar. When you hit the letter on the type writer, the bar connected to that key will go and hit the paper, thus producing a print on the paper.

I still remember taking typing classes, but cudn't quite finish them. You got to hit the keys real hard, as the every time you hit the key the bars goes and hit the paper.

Now, the inventor C. L. Sholes, had a problem. There are some very common words in English like "the", "and". If he put those letters "T", "H" side by side and when you type fast you happen to press two keys simultaneously and the bars associated with those keys get jammed.

So, he put letters which commonly occur together far away from each other. Check your key pad for letters ("A", "N") ; ("F", "O", "R") etc. They are away frm each other.

check out the study on:
http://home.earthlink.net/~dcrehr/whyqwert.html

Also, given reason for the introducing the "shift" key;

Later on ppl tried to build keyboards which were more logical. But, in those days the type writers were very common and ppl who knew typing had gud jobs. So they didn't want to change it for the fear of losing jobs and thus it slowly got widely accepted.

Magic Number 7 +/- 2

There's a paper published around 1956 by George Miller (http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~geo). He observed that a human, at a time can hold maximum 7 different, totally unrelated things (that's 2.5 bits of information, each bit corresponding to 2 alternatives).

Imagine some one has given u two choices to choose from (let's say an icecream, a shoe)..two unrelated choices..it's easy to choose. Now say, u r given 4 such choices completely unrelated, u can still manage to recall and give a choice. But 7 +/- 2 is the max no of choices tht u can put into ur memory at any instant.
(Assuming normal intelligence level)

His paper:
http://www.well.com/~smalin/miller.html

It has inspired the way bill boards are written, the number of bullets to put in a single slide of ppt, the way the advertisements are shown (max number of unrelated things tht can be shown in an ad)....and many other things.

It's fascinating...that people studied almost every little aspect of human life.