QWERTY

QWERTY is the modern-day layout of letters on most English keyboards. It takes its name from the first six letters shown on the keyboard's top row of letters.

The QWERTY design first appeared in typewriter?s in 1873. The American company Sholes and Glidden separated frequently-used pairs of letters on their machines in an attempt to stop the typebars from intertwining and becoming stuck, thus forcing the typist to manually unstick the typebars and also frequently blotting the document.

Tests have shown that other arrangements of keys can lead to more efficient typing of typical English text, and the Dvorak arrangement has had some success in that regard, but the QWERTY arrangement remains the most popular. (In fact, Sholes himself patented a different arrangement more similar to Dvorak's, but it never became popular). Minor changes to the arrangement are made for other langauges; for example in Germany, the "Z" and "Y" keys are interchanged.

The Qwerty layout:

Links:

• [The Fable of the Keys]
• http://www.mwbrooks.com/dvorak/

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