Thursday, July 20, 2006

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.