Saturday, July 27, 2013

why keyboards are not arranged in alphabetical order?????????

Everyday we chat we work and we play games on our pc but we never thought that why the alphabets are arranged in random manner here is the reason why it is so

 In 19th century, when typewriters were the standard and the invention of the computer was almost half a century away. 

The typewriter was a  device invented by  Christopher Latham Sholes, a newspaper editor and printer in the year 1873. The typewriter had metal bars known as type bars and each type bar had the mirror image of one letter or character on its end. These type bars were arranged such that all the letters appeared from A to Z. Typists found it easy to look for the letters on the keyboard and hence began to type very fast. But there was a problem with this 'normal' arrangement of letters. Rapid typing made the adjacent type bars stick to each other and this called for additional efforts from the typist, who had to manually separate them before resuming work. This problem was more often observed for adjacent keys that were frequently used together. 

To counter this problem, Sholes made a list of all frequently appearing combination of letters in the English language and after studying them, came up with a new layout. The objective of this layout was to place these letters far apart on the keyboard thus preventing the type bars from getting entangled. However, some people are of the opinion that the objective of developing the QWERTY keypad was merely to disturb the alphabetical sequence of letters so that the typists took a longer time to look for each letter, slowing down the speed of typing, in the process. A lesser speed meant less chances of the adjacent type bars getting jammed! Look at the keyboard of any standard typewriter or computer. "Q,W,E,R,T and Y" are the first six letters....

                                                                                  

No comments:

Post a Comment