The modern QWERTY keyboard layout was invented due to a limitation in the mechanical hammers of old type writers.
Type hammers are these tiny arms that moves to hit the ribbon+paper whenever a key is pressed. Due to the motion and also due to the fact that some keys/letters are used more often than others, the hammers would hit each other during typing.
The solution? re-arrange the keys so that the hammers would be least likely to collide. That gave birth to the QWERTY keyboard layout, which is used everywhere today - your phones, computers, terminals, everywhere! As modern keyboards are all electronic, that limitation has since been long gone, and experts have tried moving us to a more efficient (and faster) typing keyboard layout…. but by this time its already too late and too hard to change everyone's habit. we have simply gotten too used to QWERTY.
and oh BTW the reason why we have the SHIFT key on keyboards is also due to the design and action of old typewriters. But that's a little story for another day.
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