from Hacker News

“QWERTY wasn't designed to solve type bar jamming” [pdf]

by vishnuharidas on 3/16/25, 6:34 PM with 60 comments

• by Sniffnoy on 3/17/25, 12:30 AM

  So, to summarize, the original typewriter layout (1868) was alphabetical, with the top row (A-N) going left-to-right and the bottom row (O-Z) going right-to-left. Then (1870), the vowels (including Y) were pulled out and put in a separate top row. After that (by 1872), changes were made in order to better support the use case of people receiving Morse code, and that's when we finally start to see something that looks like QWERTY. Additional changes later got it to the modern form, but by 1872 something QWERTY-like was in place.

  And yeah -- if you look at the bottom two rows of a QWERTY keyboard, you can still see what remains of that alphabetical ordering, being left-to-right on one row followed by right-to-left on the row below!

• by analog31 on 3/16/25, 9:44 PM

  In the next century, researchers will discover that the GUI wasn't designed to make computing harder by forcing people to find cryptic little symbols, randomly arranged on the screen, and break routine operations into tiny sequences of manual steps. And it wasn't called a "personal computer" because it turned each person into a computer.

• by somat on 3/16/25, 7:39 PM

  Ha. so the reason that I is next to 8 is that early typewriters used the I as a 1(no independent 1 key) and the morse transcription company wanted to type years(1871) quickly. I love it.

• by readthenotes1 on 3/16/25, 8:48 PM

  "The legend was referred by Prof. James V. Wertsch,[22, 23] a professor of the Department of Psychology, Clark University, then it was regarded as an established theory in the field of psychology. "

  The reproducibility crisis struck early, it seems.

• by userbinator on 3/16/25, 10:11 PM

  Whatever its intent, QWERTY definitely hasn't impeded the fastest typists, who can regularly exceed 200wpm these days.

  Odd to see no mention of the Linotype layout, also known as the "Etaoin Shrdlu", given that was also a common competing keyboard layout in that era.

• by frompdx on 3/16/25, 11:38 PM

    The keyboard arrangement was incidentally changed into QWERTY, first to receive telegraphs, then to thrash out a compromise between inventors and producers, and at last to evade old patents.
  

  Interesting article. The connection to Morse code makes a lot of sense (C being similar to S). The requirement to move I below 8 to type 1870 or 1871 quickly is hilarious in retrospect. At the time who could have known the decision to focus on efficiency for the coming decade could be so enduring?

• by jader201 on 3/17/25, 2:48 AM

  This still doesn’t explain one of my biggest peeves with keyboards:

  Why are the keys angled up and to the left — for both hands?

  Was this to solve the type bar jamming?

  Or is that also an urban legend?

  I know there are modern keyboards that solve this, by either splitting the keyboard and angling in the natural direction of your fingers (so to the right for the left hand, and vice versa), or just ortholinear keyboards that have straight rows of keys (but still angled ergonomically).

  But that ridiculousness has lived on, such that even “economic” split keyboards will still angle both sides to the left.

• by ajsnigrutin on 3/17/25, 3:50 AM

  I'm more interested why some of us have qwertZ instead of Y there :D

  (Z an Y are swapped... mostly a non issues, except with some games, where Z and X are some gameplay controls, and we have a Y down there)

• by The_suffocated on 3/16/25, 7:21 PM

  Very interesting article. I don’t understand, however, how shorthanders used typewriters for short-writing. The figure on p.168 (above fig. 9) is not explanative.

• by ZeroGravitas on 3/17/25, 9:34 AM

  Or shorter: Qwerty wasn't designed.

• by weinzierl on 3/16/25, 10:43 PM

  I don't follow the connection to Morse. Can someone summarize their argument in a comprehensive way?

• by Dwedit on 3/17/25, 12:07 AM

  Now why was fricken Semicolon given the prime real-estate of being an unshifted key?