Why do we use QWERTY keyboards?

Take a moment to observe your keyboard. The letters seem to be randomly arranged but it is not actually truth!

The famous QWERTY keyboard

In the USA, through the standardization period, there was a huge competition to create a single typewriter standard.

In 1873, the first typewriter is commercialized by Remington & Sons. It was designed by Christopher Sholes, Wisconsin senator and sometime newspaper editor, and it already used the QWERTY keyboard.

The QWERTY keyboard's ancestor

Indeed, his original prototype used alphabetical order, but the bars was colliding with each other and jamming because most common letters were close. So Sholes arranged them in another way, by considering frequency and combinations of letters to prevent key clashed. QWERTY keyboard was adopted as the standard not only for English, but also for most European languages.

In 1936, Dr August Dvorak and his brother-in-law have patented the DVORAK keyboard. Its layout is more efficient because it requires less fingers movement than QWERTY, so the typing speed is better. It comes from the fact that commonly used vowels and consonants are in the middle row. That allows to type around 400 words in English language just in that row, as compared to about 100 words on QWERTY. But this design was never adopted because people had already learned how to use the inefficient QWERTY keyboard at fast speeds and had disagreed to learn a new one.

What about the AZERTY keyboard?

France’s 100 years old AZERTY keyboard (the equivalent of the English language QWERTY) will probably be reconfigured because the government ruled that it encourages bad writing.

Indeed, you can see on the ministry website that "today it is practically impossible to write French correctly using a keyboard that has been bought in France". (LOL)

More surprisingly, AFNOR group recorded that "certain European countries like Germany and Spain respect French writing better than the French are able to because their keyboards permit it!" (LOLOL)

A man struggling with his keyboard 

The main problem identified by the culture ministry is the difficulty for French writers to use "certain accented characters - and especially in upper-case".

So the Culture ministry has commissioned to AFNOR to elaborate by the summer a new norm which match with its expectations.