QWERTY

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QWERTY, (pronounced /ˈkwɝrti/) is the most common modern-day keyboard layout on English language computer and typewriter keyboards. It takes its name from the first six letters seen in the keyboard's top first row of letters. The QWERTY design was patented by Christopher Sholes in 1868 and sold to Remington in 1873, when it first appeared in typewriters.

1 History and Purpose
2 Alternative Keyboard Layouts
3 Miscellaneous facts
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] History and Purpose

The QWERTY keyboard layout was devised in the 1860s by Christopher Sholes, a newspaper editor who lived in Milwaukee, who was also the creator of the first modern typewriter. Originally, the characters on the typewriters he invented were arranged alphabetically, set on the end of a metal bar which struck the paper when its key was pressed. However, once an operator had learned to type at speed, the bars attached to letters that lay close together on the keyboard became entangled with one another, forcing the typist to manually unstick the typebars, and also frequently blotting the document.[1] Sholes decided that the best way out of the difficulty was to find out which letters were most used in the English language, and then to re-site them on the keyboard as far from each other as possible. This had the effect of reducing the speed, and, by doing so, lessened the chance of clashing type bars. In this way was born the QWERTY keyboard, named after the first six letters on the top line.

The home row (ASDFGHJKL) of the QWERTY layout is thought to be a remnant of the old alphabetical layout that QWERTY replaced. QWERTY also attempted to alternate keys between hands, allowing one hand to move into position while the other hand strikes home a key. This sped up both the original double-handed hunt-and-peck technique and the later touch typing technique; however, single-handed words such as stewardesses, lollipop and monopoly show flaws in the alternation.

[edit] Alternative Keyboard Layouts

Minor changes to the arrangement are made for other languages; for example, German keyboards add umlauts to the right of "P" and "L", and interchange the "Z" and "Y" keys both because "Z" is a much more common letter than "Y" in German (the latter seldom appearing except in borrowed words), and because "T" and "Z" often appear next to each other in the German language; consequently, they are known as QWERTZ keyboards. Czech keyboards share this arrangement. A similar layout is used on Hungarian keyboards, where the home row is longer than usual, it consists of the keys "ADFGHJKLÉÁŰ" (although the letter "Ű" is sometimes at the end of the number row). French keyboards interchange both "Q" and "W" with "A" and "Z", and move "M" to the right of "L"; they are known as AZERTY keyboards. Italian typewriter keyboards (but not most computer keyboards) use a QZERTY layout where "Z" is swapped with "W" and "M" is at the right of "L". Portuguese keyboards maintain the QWERTY layout but add an extra key: the letter "C" with cedilla (Ç) after the "L" key. In this place, the Spanish version has the letter "N" with tilde (Ñ) and the "Ç" (which is not used in Spanish, but is part of sibling languages like French, Portuguese and Catalan) is placed at the rightmost position of the home line, beyond the diacritical dead keys.

Norwegian keyboards inserts "Å" to the right of "P", "Ø" to the right of "L", and "Æ" to the right of "Ø", thus not changing the appearance of the rest of the keyboard. The Danish layout is like the Norwegian, only switching "Æ" and "Ø", and Swedish and Finnish has their letters "Ä" and "Ö" in those places. Some keyboards for Lithuania use a layout known as ĄŽERTY, where "Ą" appears in place of "Q" above "A", Ž in place of "W" above "S", with "Q" and "W" being available either on the far right-hand side or by use of the Alt Gr key.

This French Matra Alice uses the AZERTY layout

Because modern keyboards do not suffer from the problems of older mechanical keyboards, the QWERTY layout's separation of frequently used letter pairs is no longer necessary. Several alternative keyboard layouts, such as Dvorak Simplified Keyboard arrangement (designed by Dr. August Dvorak and William Dealey and patented in 1936), have been designed to increase a typist's speed and comfort, largely by moving the most common letters to the home row and maximizing hand alternation. The effectiveness of these layouts is disputed. Some studies [2] have shown that alternative methods are more efficient, but Dvorak and other alternative typists most often cite comfort as the greatest advantage. QWERTY's inventor, Christopher Scholes, patented a key arrangement similar to Dvorak's, but it never became popular.

Some researchers, such as economists Stan Liebowitz at the University of Texas at Dallas, Texas, and Stephen E. Margolis of North Carolina State University, claim that QWERTY is really no less efficient than other layouts. Some believe that there is evidence to support the claim that Dvorak is faster. The world record for typing speed was made on a Dvorak keyboard. Opponents point out that August Dvorak stood to gain from the success of his layout, and that he may have perpetuated his "efficiency myth" to increase his financial gains. Other QWERTY advocates claim that for a QWERTY typist to switch to Dvorak or another layout requires more effort than initially learning to touch-type, because of having to retrain the fingers' muscle memory. Computer users also need to unlearn the habit of pressing key shortcuts (for example: Ctrl-C for copy, Ctrl-X for cut, Ctrl-V for paste, on Microsoft Windows). However, some programs and operating systems allow the use of alternate layouts combined with QWERTY shortcuts; for example, Apple's Mac OS X offers a "Dvorak-Qwerty" keyboard layout that temporarily reverts to Qwerty while the Command key is held down.

Image:Keyboard-Dvorak-norwegian.JPG

Opponents of alternative keyboard designs most often point to QWERTY's ubiquity as a deciding factor, because the costs incurred by using the supposedly inefficient layout are much less than those of retraining typists. It is not unusual to find Dvorak typists who also touch-type the QWERTY layout for convenience, since QWERTY dominates the keyboard market. The tension between the Dvorak efficiency and the QWERTY ubiquity illustrates the problem of collective switching costs, assuming QWERTY's relative inefficiency.

Besides the Dvorak layout, there are many other newer alternative keyboard layouts, but those layouts have not gained widespread use.

[edit] Miscellaneous facts

The longest common English word that can be typed using only the left hand (using conventional hand placement) is stewardesses. The words sweaterdresses and aftercataracts are longer and can also be typed with only the left hand, but they are not in all dictionaries.
The longest English word that can be typed with the right hand only (using conventional hand placement) is johnny-jump-up, or alternatively polyphony.
The word typewriter can be typed entirely using the top row of the QWERTY keyboard; Clive (Max) Maxfield and Alvin Brown have stated that the inventor of the QWERTY keyboard "craftily ensured that the word 'Typewriter' could be constructed using only the top row of letters. This was intended to aid salesmen when they were giving demonstrations. [3]
Teeter-totter is the longest word that can be typed on the top row with hyphens. [4]
Long English words that can be typed with the keys of one row only include typewriter, property, and rupturewort.
The average person is expected to type 30-40 words per minute using the touch typing technique on a QWERTY keyboard. 40-50 words per minute is considered good.
QWERTY is the name of the Bible-verse-displaying computer in VeggieTales shows.