We use it every day but we rarely acknowledge its importance. The keyboard as we know it today has an interesting history. A number of keyboard layouts were proposed by different inventors but the 'QWERTY' layout is the most commonly used keyboard. Everything from Smartphone’s to Supercomputer’s use the ‘QWERTY’ keyboard.
The ’QWERTY’ keyboard was created in the early 1870’s by Christopher Latham Sholes. He was a newspaper editor and printer. He always had a problem with the 'Type Writer' he used, it often used to get jammed. The reason behind it was that the metal bars that held the keys got stuck when two adjacent keys were pressed in quick succession. This led him to design a keyboard where commonly used letters are not adjacent to each other. He tried various designs finally settling on the ‘QWERTY’ design.
He successfully filed a patent for his new type writer which soon gained popularity. The original layout did not consist of the alphabet ‘R’ on the first row, but when he sold the manufacturing rights to a company called ‘E. Remington and Sons’ it modified it to form the ‘QWERTY’ version.
The type writer was used as the source of data entry when the first computers were invented. This was the case till the late 1960’s during which the modern computer keyboard was designed. The ‘QWERTY’ layout was used as the basis for the keyboard design. The popularity of this layout at that time made it easy to adapt. The keyboard design underwent many changes to make it more suitable to add new buttons that were required by computers.
We often forget the importance of the simplest things that we use everyday. We cannot imagine a computer without a keyboard. Although the ‘Type Writer’ is now obsolete its keyboard design continues to find a place even in this tech savvy generation.
By
Ashish Samarpit
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