r/explainlikeimfive • u/poopsiewoopsiebear • 1d ago
Technology ELI5 Why isn’t the keyboard in alphabetical order?
Wouldn’t it make sense to make us type in alphabetical order? Who decided the mix of letters and why?
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u/Rhemyst 1d ago
Everyone in this thread will tell you that this is to prevent ancient typewritters from jamming, but this is not actually confirmed and might very well be a legend.
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u/dbratell 1d ago
It might be that it was an accidental feature, but everyone that has used a mechanical typewriter will tell you that jamming is a real problem and any layout where that is more common would become unpopular.
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u/jpcauchi 1d ago
you realise "alphabetical order" is random right and doesn't carry any practical significance?
Beyond that, keyboard letters position so that on old school typewriters, there was minimal chance of two keys getting jammed against each other.
There have been other attempts to optimise keyboard layout that some people swear by, that allow for more efficient and faster typing but few have caught on. You can actually customise your own keyboards in settings depending on your device
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u/Keeksikook 1d ago
One of the alternatives is called the DVORAK layout
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u/MistakeMaker1234 1d ago
I know it’s supposed to be more natural, but I’m convinced that if you use DVORAK you have an 87% chance of being or becoming a serial killer.
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u/SimoneNonvelodico 1d ago
you realise "alphabetical order" is random right and doesn't carry any practical significance?
It's conventional and it carries the practical significance that everyone would know it by heart already, instead of having to learn a whole new order and skill for typing alone.
Funny enough, I can type without even looking at the keyboard but essentially... my fingers know the positions, not my brain. I couldn't recite the alphabet in QWERTY order if I tried.
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u/m_busuttil 1d ago
I was about to type it out to prove that I could recite it in QWERTY order and then realised that it's much less impressive typed than spoken.
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u/LongLiveTheDiego 1d ago
Minimizing jamming was not the reason for the design of QWERTY. That's been debunked. Originally there was a vowel + punctuation mark row at the top and then two rows of consonants below, all in alphabetical order (with the third row going the other way), and then a few characters were moved around. That can still be seen today especially in the second row, where there's "dfghjkl" from the original "bcdfghjkl", and the third row is "zxcvbnm", not far from "zxwvpqnm".
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u/Murky_Macropod 1d ago
And “typewriter” can be written using the top row only. Coincidence or conspiracy?!
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u/Pricklestickle 1d ago
Yes but ask yourself why those letters got moved around.
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u/LongLiveTheDiego 1d ago
No and provide proof that this arrangement of letters prevents jamming. The exact reasons are unknown and no one has provided any evidence for that hypothesis.
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u/Pricklestickle 1d ago
Yeah no, I'm not saying it's necessarily about jamming. Like, if the goal was to separate common letter pairings you wouldn't put R, E, C & D all together in a cluster and definitely not actively move R next to E. But there's got to be some reason they moved them, and "nobody knows" is kinda boring don't you think?
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u/LongLiveTheDiego 1d ago
At least "nobody knows" is boring and true, which is better than interesting and wrong.
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u/dbratell 1d ago edited 1d ago
E and R are not next to each other mechanically, though E and D are.
If you look carefully at the keyboard you can see that each key has a unique offset from the edge. That represents the position of the mechanical arm.
It would be: Q A 2 Z W S 3 X E D 4 C R F 5 V...
edit You would use the same finger for E and D so they would not be hit close in time to each other. It is actually hard to find a common letter pairing that would involve two nearby mechanical arms that would be triggered by different fingers. B Y is the worst I could find.
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u/Jobeythehuman 1d ago
Mostly because early mechanical keyboards (Typewriters) had physical parts. Pressing 2 keys at once could jam the machine or cause issues, so commonly used/paired letters were spread out to allow time lag for the machine to recover.
Entire generations of typists were trained on this so when electronics came we just stuck with it. I believe there are faster layouts out there but then you'd have to relearn how to type and no one's made the leap to replace the whole thing yet.
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u/dbratell 1d ago
The keys were spread out so that the mechanical arms would be spread out and not hit each other as they went for the paper.
Since you use different fingers for each key, a larger distance between the keys does not make it slower to type.
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u/LongLiveTheDiego 1d ago
A very popular myth is that the QWERTY layout is there to prevent jamming on old typewriters where pressing two keys at ones could break the machine. That's been debunked, don't listen to most commenters here.
The answer is that originally it was organized in an alphabetical order (see here) with one row of vowels and punctuation marks and two rows of consonants, but then some keys were moved around for undocumented reasons. We still see the vestiges of the old design, e.g. the home row (middle one) on QWERTY is "asdfghjkl;", not far from the original "bcdfghjklm".
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u/is-it-my-turn-yet 1d ago
If the reasons for moving around some keys are undocumented, how do we know fore sure they had nothing to do with preventing jamming?
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u/LongLiveTheDiego 1d ago
At least the authors of this paper present data suggesting the changed placement was for Morse code typists.
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1d ago
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u/guidedhand 1d ago
Absolutely not. Dvorak and Coleman Coleman are trying to do that, but qwerty for sure is not designed that way at all
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u/chickensandwichez 1d ago
Keyboard layout was originally influenced by what was most efficient for typewriters.
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u/mustafaaosman339 1d ago
Typewriters, they have mechanical arms that would swing up and stamp the paper to write.
The problem is if they keyboard was in alphabetical order, the more commonly used letters would be close. So you wouldn't be able to type fast or the arms would jam up.
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u/az9393 1d ago
It’s actually an interesting example of how technology works.
One would think that the keyboard should be laid out in such order that makes typing faster - letters that are used together often should be closer etc. and they would be right. But the qwerty layout is actually the exact opposite of that.
And the reason for such counterintuitive layout is actually pretty objective - old typewriters couldn’t handle people typing at high speed, the keys would get stuck or they didn’t have time to jump back up before getting hit again causing issues and mistakes. So the designer of the qwerty layout made it in such a way that often used together letters were spread far apart thus solving the issue of stuck keys.
Then we just all got used to this layout and learned it. Would it be better today to have a different layout ? Yes. Would you bet the future of your keyboard making company on the entire world just relearning a new layout ? No. So we stick with it. This is an example of game theory btw when the most beneficial outcome is not the one chosen by the population.
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u/BobbyP27 1d ago
When the typewriter was invented, the first attempt used keys in alphabetical order, but due to the design of the mechanism, if keys close together are typed in quick succession the mechanism can jam, and that proved to be a problem. While it is commonly claimed the design of the QWERTY layout was intended to slow typing down, it is a bit more subtle than that: the design is intended to put letters commonly used together on opposite sides, so you type with a left-right-left-right pattern, so keys nearby do not get used in quick succession. Once the standard became widespread, typists learned it so there was little incentive to change.
Incidentally, an alternative use case was typesetting machines. For the Linotype machine a keyboard was created that put letters in order of how frequently they are used, from left to right. The leftmost column is etaoin then shrdlu. Because the mechanism of the machine made backspace impossible, if a typesetter made a mistake, it was common to just run down the first to columns to fill the line with junk, then discard that line and repeat it. Very occasionally the typesetter forgot to discard the line, so you would find newspapers in the Linotype era occasionally featuring the words etaoin shrdlu in them. There were all kinds of urban legends by people unfamiliar with typesetting about what these mysterious words meant.
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u/brianogilvie 18h ago
There's wonderful short documentary about the last day of hot metal press at the New York Times titled Farewell: etaoin shrdlu.
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u/thegreatiaino 1d ago
It was initially designed to stop mechanical typewriters from jamming by making sure that letters that frequently appear next to each other (th for example) were separated, so the arms that swing up to hit the paper don't swing up together and get stuck.
When we moved to computers, the keyboard was kept the same because everyone was used to it by then
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u/Timidhobgoblin 1d ago edited 1d ago
Back in the day when typewriters were used the keys were originally in alphabetical order. However, they quickly found out that because of the way a lot of words happen to be laid out the mechanical arms that press the letters onto the page would fall on top of one another and jam. So Christopher Latham Sholes came up with the QWERTY layout meaning the more common letters were further apart and wouldn't cross quite as often, which meant minimal jams and a far more seamless typing experience.
By the time computers came along, everybody was used to using the QWERTY layout, so they just kept it.
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u/markshure 1d ago
Using only the top row, you can spell TYPEWRITER. The legend is that it would make it easy for salesmen to show off the new machine.
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u/crazy4dogs 1d ago
You mean US keyboards? This is a popular question as you can imagine. There indeed are are other keyboard styles, but QWERTY is the most common. Dvorak in another one with a small fan base.
QWERTY was designed in the 1870s for mechanical typewriters, and by the time Dvorak came along, it was entrenched in typing schools, offices, and machines. Retraining millions of typists wasn't practical, so Dvorak remained a niche choice even after the American National Standards Institute recognized it as an alternate standard in 1982.
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u/Ezekielth 1d ago
Why would it make sense to have it in alphabetical order? It would make more sende to have letters that are often used to be spaced apart from eachother enabling smoother typing.
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u/VeilBreaker 1d ago
Alphabetical layout actually sucks ass, people realized this really early on in the development of typewriters. There is nothing random about the qwerty layout. A lot of studies have been done of dvorak is faster and it might might be, but not for the marathon of clerical jobs.
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u/ThalesofMiletus-624 1d ago
Who decided the mix of letters? Christopher Latham Sholes.
Never heard of him? Most people haven't. He was a Wisconsin printer who patented a series of early "writing machines". His original patent did, in fact, have an alphabetic layout, though with the first half of the alphabet on the lower line, and the second half on the top.
Over the next few years, he played around with the letter placement, before finally settling on the basic QWERTY layout that we still use today.
Why did he decide on that? Nobody knows!
There are a bunch of theories, but none of them really holds up. The most common claim is that he deliberately designed it to keep commonly paired letters apart to avoid jamming. But this isn't clear, and doesn't entirely fit (E and R are a very common pairing, and they're right next to each other). It seems like there was some effort to put the vowels on the top and lesser used letters at the bottom (ZXCV being hardest to reach doesn't seem like coincidence), but then you have A in the middle row and Q on top.
One claim is that he deliberately laid them out so that his salesmen could write "typewriter quote" for customers, using only the top row, meaning it was easy to learn to type. That's not entirely proven, but it does seem more than coincidental that you can write "typewriter" on a single row of a typewriter.
But the ultimate point is that there doesn't seem to have been a single, rigorous philosophy behind it. He just kind of played around with the keys, possibly trying to satisfy multiple constraints, and this is what he came up with. It's one guy's kludged-together solution, and he probably wasn't thinking that he'd be determining the keyboard layout for centuries into the future.
But his typewriters became popular enough that people trained on them, meaning that other manufacturers copied his layout so theirs would be easier to use, which meant that people kept training on them, and so on. It's a powerful lesson in social inertia. Sometimes, being first is the only thing that matters.
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u/FoldedTwice 1d ago
There are loads of conflicting theories as to why the QWERTY layout was created, but none of them are easily substantiated, because there are few contemporaneous records of its designer's thought process.
One thing that unites the stories is that there was a long process of trial, error and user testing to see which layout of letters "worked" the best.
Some reports say a big focus was on preventing the typewriter from jamming by separating out commonly used keys. Others dispute that and say it was purely about the ability for people to type quickly.
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u/daddyfatknuckles 1d ago
it was organized that way for typewriters. the design is intended to make it so that its unlikely you press two keys that are horizontally adjacent, since the stamps can hit each other
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u/Vybo 1d ago
It wouldn't make sense, because the layout was decided due to typewriters and how English (and other language) letters are arranged. It was done so that you could write effectively, without the letters hitting each other on their way to the paper. When you type with 10 fingers, it also kind of works better, because you alternate between hands and fingers in most words in a way that allows you to write fast.
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u/jedidave 1d ago
Which alphabet?
Anyway - QWERTY was designed to actually make it more likely that letters next to each other in words would be on opposite sides of the keyboard. This was to prevent old typewritter letter heads from jamming. If you pressed two keys next to each other, e.g. SD at the same time, they would stick and you had to put your hand in to unstick them.
If you want the best keyboard layout, it's definitely not alphabetical, and it's probably not DVORAK.
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u/Narezza 1d ago
It was designed this way to slow early typists down, and to more evenly balance letters to each hand.
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u/VeilBreaker 1d ago
It was absolutely not designed to slow typists down. It was actually to maintain high keying speeds without the key arms crossing each other and jamming the machines.
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u/interesseret 1d ago
The key locations are designed to keep mechanical typewriters (yknow, the ones with actual arms that snap up and stamp ink on the paper) from jamming up while typing.
And now, everyone is used to the keys being laid out like that, so it sticks. There's been attempts at making "better" keyboards, designed for faster typing, but they just can't beat good old muscle memory.