K for Keyboard
All of us keyboard in our day to day life, at least with the smart device in your hand. Though people have been shifting to voice messages and virtual assistants now. Will keyboard be thing of the past if voice messages takes forefront :D. It’s a topic for another day.
During my teenage, I used to wonder why are the keys of keyboard arranged in such a random pattern? Why aren’t they ordered alphabetically? I didn’t know much about the most underrated technical skill back in time. Today the question strike me back and googling helped me serve my curiosity. Let’s see how it evolved into the QWERTY design.
It has been rumoured that if the alphabets are sorted alphabetically. Mechanical typewriters could jam if humans hit the keys too fast. That’s why to slow down the typist the keys were arranged randomly. You will still find this rationale in the first few results if you google it up.
Per wikipedia, the fastest typing speed ever, 212 words per minute, was achieved by Stella Pajunas-Garnand from Chicago in 1946 in one minute on an IBM electric using the QWERTY key layout. Just wondering the keys didn’t get jam in QWERTY format but are strongly rumoured to get jammed in alphabetically ordered. That’s crazy..
The QWERTY design wasn’t an accidental pattern. It evolved with time just like civilisation in a complex manner. The beta-tester and early adopters included telegraph operators, who needed to type in the message quickly, found the alphabetically arrangement to be confusing and inefficient for translating the Morse code. Further researchers found that the QWERTY pattern evolved as per the instructions received from the telegraph operators. Be curious to know the little things around you (:
You are free to question the status quo and come up with a newer design :P, may be it can be more efficient. You never know until you attempt!
FUN FACT: Tell me a word which can be typed using only the left hand or only the right hand..
Cheers to the cohort members for kicking off the Tiny Project!
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