Re: WHY ARE THE KEYS ON COMPUTERS NOT ARRANGED ALPHABETICALLY?

Hello Shibani.

The first typewriters were mechanical, not electric. Pressing the keys caused rods with the different letters engraved on them to rise up and strike a colored ribbon. The ribbon was pressed between the engraved letter and the paper, so the ink on the ribbon was transferred to the page.

If two keys were pressed at once, the rods they moved would hit one another. They often hit each other while one rod was coming down and a second rod was rising up. To help prevent this problem, the keyboard layout we use today, called "qwerty", was used on these early mechanical typewriters. The "qwerty" layout seperated the keys used most often from one another, so that common words like "and" and "the" used keys on different sides of the keyboard. This lessened the chance of the rods striking each other if the typist was typing fast.

By the time electrical typewriters and computers were introduced, everybody was familiar with "qwerty". Market forces came into play. Typists would rather buy an outdated keyboard that was familiar, rather than a more logical but less familiar keyboard. So "qwerty" is still in use today.

I hope this answers your question,

Layne Johnson

Admin note:
David Ehnebuske adds the following:

Shibani,

Thanks for your interesting question. I have often wondered why the keys on computer keyboards are in such a strange order myself. Of course, the reason new keyboards are built that way is so that people who have already learned the order of the keys can use them. But how did they get to be that way in the first place? Why not ABCDEF as you suggested?

To find out I had a look on the web. I chose to use the search engine called altavista, but I'm sure that any of the other web search engines would do. (A "search engine" is a web site that you can use to find out what web pages are available that talk about things you are interested in.) Knowing that the keyboard we use in the USA is called a "qwerty"(pronounced KWER-tee) keyboard because of the order of the keys on the first row of letters, I asked altavista to find me web pages with "QWERTY" in them. It found lots of them. I had a look at some, starting at the top of the list.

The first one, from superkids.com, says that the qwerty order comes from the original typewriter back in the 1870's. So, why did the person who invented the typewriter put the keys in that order? Superkids says there is an old story that the keys were put in that order to slow typists down. By slowing them down, the story goes, it helped keep the typewriter from jamming. But superkids says the story is wrong. They claim the qwerty order is like that so that the original typewriter sales people could type "typewriter" quickly. If you look at your keyboard you'll see that all the letters for that word are on the top row of letter keys! Well, I don't know....the story about the jamming typewriters still sounds like it might be true to me. Besides, I never trust the first source I read. So I had a look further down the list.

A little further on I found an article from kith.org. It says the exact opposite. It says that the fast-typing sales people story is sort of bogus, but that the jamming story is true.

Getting two different stories from the web (or from any other sources) isn't too surprising. After all, people often repeat what they heard as if it were fact when they don't know for sure. So, I kept looking. The next sensible-looking article I found was at earthlink.net. It came down on the "jamming" side of the argument. It provides lots of details, like a picture of the keyboard from the original typewriter patent. Also, it explains that the idea wasn't to slow typists down, but to speed them up by preventing jamming. (When the typewriter jammed, it really slowed things down!) And it gives a good explanation of the tests the inventor did to choose the arrangement of the keys.

A quick look down the list at further articles and a check of some other search sites brought lots of articles, but none really had new information.

Balancing everything, I'd say the earthlink site has the real story. Still, you might ask, how do I know that's right? Well I don't. At least not the way that I know whether it's Thursday. But by looking at what various people say about it, seeing what they agree on and disagree on, and thinking about what evidence they have to support what they say I'm almost 100% sure earthlink story is the right answer.

By the way, there really are ABCD keyboards for computers. And there are lots of other arrangements, but they have never caught on because there are way too many people around who already know how to type on a qwerty keyboard. So I guess we're stuck with qwerty keyboards. (Maybe we could rearrange the alphabet to go QWERTY... That would solve the problem, wouldn't it? But then there are so many people who know their ABC's. I guess most of them wouldn't like it.)

Hope this answers your question.