You ever wonder why most keyboards are set up the way they are? Well, It all started with a man named
Christopher Sholes. The keyboard that he patented in 1878 is the same one that is widely used today.
His typewriter, the Remington N°2 received a great deal of commercial success. It was successful because it was the first typewriter to offer both upper and lower case letters with the use of the SHIFT key. However, the Remington had an odd layout. Rather than placing letters in alphabetical order, they were put in the QWERTY format.
One story says that this was to slow down typist, who had become too fast and had to be slowed down by a new layout. This is not true. This was done in order to speed up typist who were slowed down by paper jams.
By placing commonly used-together letters farther apart, the paper being fed directly underneath the keys would be less likely to jam. Also, the placement is weird, instead of having rows and columns,
the QWERTY keyboard has diagonal rows. The keys were arranged like this to make room for the levers of typewriter.
So, all in all, our computer keyboards are essentially remnants of the past.
