in Home & Hobbies Channel,
Last Sunday, while I was waiting for my 7238th Windows installation to finish, I was watching my keyboard and I suddenly thought why is it that most used keys such as A, E, R, W are so far from the center of the keyboard, while I can quickly access J, K, B and F?
Well I kept this question in a corner of my head, then I took some free time to do some research, and I discovered very interesting explanations.
Believe it or not, QWERTY was invented in 1860 to slow strokes on typewriters, which had at that time a very fragile mechanics. Indeed, if 2 keys were successively stroked too quickly, their stems could hook themselves causing the mechanic to jam.
Then came Christopher Scholes, who invented the perfect keys position to slowdown any gun machine-style-typing-writer, he started with separating both sides of the keyboard, and moving the most frequently used letters to the farest places in the keyboard area.
Through the years many other standards appeared, the most known is AZERTY.
Today, the typewriting machines have almost disappeared, but its legacy is now being seriously criticized.
A lot of studies were made to redefine the keyboard layout, one of the most succeeding challengers (I mean by success that the norm is a little bit known on geek’s community) is the Dvorak layout, now check this and tell me what do you think about it:
Basic Dvorak
bépo Dvorak (french adaptation):
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Personally I would stick on my AZERTY for text writing and QWERTY for development, even if I know now that it is a non-sense to use such an obsolete layout.
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