Although today's electronic devices are changing with each passing day, the keyboard is still one of the indispensable elements, but in daily use, do you have the same question as me, why the phonetic keyboard is arranged in an orderly manner from top to bottom, left to right, but the ABCD of the English keyboard is disrupted, and the keyboard of QWERTY is used?
Printing was too slow, so there was a typewriter
The history of the keyboard has been hundreds of years, much longer than the computer, and if we want to talk about the origin of the keyboard, we have to go back to the second industrial revolution.
China invented movable type printing during the Northern Song Dynasty, and the technology evolved to Korea, Japan, the Middle East, and Europe until 1455, when the Germanic people used movable type printing to complete the Gutenberg Bible.
Although printing technology has accelerated the speed of text dissemination, it is still too slow for a field like the courtroom that requires real-time recording of text, so the typewriter was born.
The ABCD arrangement method is so easy to use that the machine is broken
The earliest typewriters looked like a piano, and the letters on the keyboard were arranged differently than now, only in accordance with the ABCD order, and there were only 28 keys, and the position was very easy to remember, but it was also because it was too easy to remember, and the user quickly adapted to its use, so in the case of typing too fast, the machine structure at that time could not be loaded, but led to the replacement rate of the typewriter was too high.
The invention of the typewriter was to speed up the dissemination of information and the convenience of recording, but this keyboard design caused more inconvenience to users, and was criticized by many people, so later an editor of a publishing house helped people invent a new keyboard arrangement, making typing fast and convenient, and not making the typewriter easily damaged.
Letters are scattered in different places to avoid the problem of keyboard jamming
Christopher Latham Sholes, an editor at a publishing house in the United States, spent six years inventing the first typewriter with a QWERTY keyboard. As editors, it is natural that there is a lot of need to use the keyboard to type, and Christopher and his colleagues wanted to build a typewriter that would benefit others and improve their own productivity.
In the past, mechanical typewriters used to hit the front button to drive the firing pin behind and print the letters on the paper, but if the ABCD keyboard sequence was followed, the typewriter could easily get stuck with the adjacent firing pin. In order to solve this problem, Christopher has developed a new "QWERTY keyboard", which is arranged according to a special law, the letters are not in order, but scattered in different positions, so that the problem of the keyboard can be avoided when typing.
The design of the "QWERTY keyboard" was such a success that the team that invented it formally patented it in 1878 and got Remington Rand, the world's largest typewriter company, to agree to adopt it, and it has survived to this day.
At that time, in addition to producing typewriters, the Remington Rand Company even provided training courses for the general public, which made more and more typists loyal to the brand's typewriters, and therefore, companies that wanted to hire trained typists had to buy Remington Rand typewriters first.
Opponents who tried to replace the QWERTY keyboard but failed
The QWERTY keyboard has also encountered a number of competitors, the biggest of which is the "Dvorak keyboard", invented by August Dvorak in 1930, when the QWERTY keyboard was already dominant in the world, and it was not easy for users to adapt to the new keyboard, so Dvorak quickly disappeared from view.
Later, in 2013, an article published in SmartNews introduced an innovative keyboard system that is more efficient to use than the QWERTY keyboard, and said that this keyboard will replace the QWERTY we have been using for hundreds of years, and it is called "KALQ", which is a keyboard designed specifically for touch panels.
Nowadays, almost all people type with their thumbs, so KALQ follows this user model, inventing a configuration suitable for mobile phones and tablets, which is said to increase the user's typing speed by 34%, but in the subconscious of modern humans, it has long been accustomed to the old QWERTY keyboard, and it is difficult to change it suddenly, so QWERTY has become a human habit from a simple keyboard input method, and even a part of the big culture.