XrayMan
Those actually existed you know....
Keyboard layouts: "QWERTY" and others
The "
QWERTY" layout of typewriter keys became a
de facto standard and continues to be used long after the reasons for its adoption (including reduction of key/lever entanglements) have ceased to apply.
The 1874 Sholes & Glidden typewriters established the "
QWERTY" layout for the letter keys. During the period in which Sholes and his colleagues were experimenting with this invention, other keyboard arrangements were apparently tried, but these are poorly documented.
[27] The near-alphabetical sequence on the "home row" of the QWERTY layout (a-s-d-f-g-h-j-k-l) demonstrates that a straightforward alphabetical arrangement was the original starting point.
[28] The QWERTY layout of keys has become the
de facto standard for English-language typewriter and computer keyboards. Other languages written in the
Latin alphabet sometimes use variants of the QWERTY layouts, such as the French
AZERTY, the Italian
QZERTY and the German
QWERTZ layouts.
The QWERTY layout is not the most efficient layout possible, since it requires a touch-typist to move his or her fingers between rows to type the most common letters.
The most likely explanation is that the QWERTY arrangement was designed to reduce the likelihood of internal clashing by placing commonly used combinations of letters farther from each other inside the machine.
[28][29] This allowed the user to type faster without jamming. In a mechanical typewriter, the arrangement of bars is tied to the arrangement of the keys, and the two adjacent bars are much more likely to clash if engaged together or in a rapid sequence.
Another story is that the QWERTY layout allowed early typewriter salesmen to impress their customers by being able to easily type out the example word "typewriter" without having learnt the full keyboard layout, because "typewriter" can be spelled purely on the top row of the keyboard.
A number of radically different layouts such as
Dvorak have been proposed to reduce the perceived inefficiencies of QWERTY, but none have been able to displace the QWERTY layout; their proponents claim considerable advantages, but so far none has been widely used. The
Blickensderfer typewriter with its
DHIATENSOR layout may have possibly been the first attempt at optimizing the keyboard layout for efficiency advantages.
Many non-Latin alphabets have keyboard layouts that have nothing to do with QWERTY. The Russian layout, for instance, puts the common trigrams ыва, про, and ить on adjacent keys so that they can be typed by rolling the fingers. The Greek layout, on the other hand, is a variant of QWERTY.
Typewriters were also made for
East Asian languages with thousands of characters, such as
Chinese or
Japanese. They were not easy to operate, but professional typists used them for a long time until the development of electronic word processors and
laser printers in the 1980s. See the "Gallery" at the end of this article for pictures of East Asian mechanical typewriters.
On modern keyboards, the exclamation point is the shifted character on the 1 key, a direct result of the historical fact that these were the last characters to become "standard" on keyboards. Holding the spacebar pressed down usually suspended the carriage advance mechanism (a so-called "dead key" feature), allowing one to superimpose multiple keystrikes on a single location. The ¢ symbol (meaning cents) was located above the number 6 on old typewriters, while modern keyboards now have ^ instead.
Long ago :P
I don't think I could have done that though lol