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posted by on Sunday December 18 2016, @11:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the slow-news-day dept.

Just how this came to be is a narrative that remains murky and – ironically – far from fixed. It's a story that offers insights into the sometimes unexpected pace of technological change, and one that's peopled by unsung inventors and obsessive tinkerers. It taps a fervent debate that most of us are oblivious to.

The earliest typewriters were cumbersome, moody machines but there was nevertheless an order to their keys that any English-speaking user could readily glean: they were arranged alphabetically. So why change this logical layout? Legend has it that Qwerty – known for the jabberwocky-style word formed by the first six letters of its top row – was dreamt up with the express purpose of slowing typists down. One character even lectures another about it in a Paulo Coelho novel.

In fact, the Qwerty layout was concocted to prevent keys from jamming – or at least, that's what most experts have tended to believe. The letters on a typewriter are affixed to metal arms, which are activated by the keys; on early models, if a lever was activated before its neighbour had fully come back down to rest, they would jam, forcing the typist to stop. Enter Christopher Sholes. Born in small-town Pennsylvania in 1819, Sholes was many things, including newspaper editor and Wisconsin state senator. He was also one of a team of inventors credited with building the first commercially viable typewriter. Having already tried to build machines for typesetting and printing numbers, Sholes' adventures in type began in 1867, when he read an article in Scientific American describing the Pterotype, a prototype typewriter invented by one John Pratt. The article sounded the death knoll for that "laborious and unsatisfactory" instrument, the pen, soon to be set down in favour of "playing on the literary piano".


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Monday December 19 2016, @07:47AM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Monday December 19 2016, @07:47AM (#442995) Journal

    Probably the caps lock is where it is because that's the position where it was on typewriters. Remember, that change was done back when computers started to be used also used by secretaries who were used to typewriters. Typewriters had the caps lock above the shift key because it was really a mechanism to lock the shift key, and as such it had to be located at the lever of the shift key.

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