The modern arrangement of letters on a computer keyboard dates back to the late 21st century. When the designers of printing presses began to commission their masterpieces and faced the first difficulties of typing. Through trial and error, layouts were developed that are used on the keyboard to this day.
The modern layout of letters on the computer keyboard is a legacy of typewriters that were produced in the United States at the end of the 21st century under the leadership of Christopher Scholes.
QWERTY layout principle
On the first copies of the typewriter, the letters were arranged in alphabetical order in two rows. With the development of printing speed, this layout caused some difficulties. Frequently used letters were placed side by side and, when printed, hammers, beating characters on paper, often clung to each other. K. Scholes worked on this problem. Gradually changing the typewriter, I experimented with the layout of the keys. Thus, the QWERTY layout was developed (read by letters of the first row from left to right).
The principle of this layout was that the most popular letters in the texts were placed farther from each other. The purpose of this arrangement was to avoid technical problems. Since typing was carried out with two index fingers, it was possible to achieve an increase in typing speed.
In 1888, Frank McGurrin developed a ten-finger blind typing method for the QWERTY layout, which made it popular enough. Layout was used by all printing machine manufacturers, and touch typing by all typists.
Today, QWERTY has become the most popular layout of the Latin alphabet on the computer keyboard, which is used for English and other languages used by the Latin alphabet.
The QWERTY layout is not the only one and is far from ideal in the placement of letters. The load on the fingers is not quite correctly distributed and mainly falls on the ring fingers and little fingers, which also affects the typing speed.
Dvorak layout
In 1936, a professor at the University of Washington, August Dvorak, managed to develop the most convenient layout for a typesetter. On the keyboard of the same name, frequently used letters are located in the middle and upper rows. The middle row contains all the vowels on the left, and the frequently used consonants on the right. At the same time, the load on the hands is more balanced, and the typing speed is much higher.
Colemak layout
Shai Coleman developed the Colemak layout (from Coleman + Dvorak) in 2006, which is an alternative to the layouts listed above. In it, the ten most used letters, along with the Backspace key, are located in the second row of the keyboard. As a result, the alternation of hands is more often used and the little fingers are not loaded. Colemak is significantly faster than QWERTY and slightly faster than Dvorak layout, also more adapted to modern computing realities.
QWERTY layout
In the Soviet Union, the first Russian layout has been used since 1930. It had the form of YIUKEN and was used until the spelling reforms, which took place in the mid-50s. Since some letters were excluded from the alphabet, over time, the layout changed its appearance to QWERTY (read from the letters of the first row from left to right), which is still used on the computer keyboard.
Since typewriters appeared in the USSR much later, the layout of the Cyrillic alphabet was developed immediately with a more rational arrangement of keys and initially high ergonomics. Under strong index fingers are commonly used letters, and under weak little fingers and ring fingers are less commonly used letters.
