The choice to mix the keys of the keyboard in such a chaotic and bizarre way dates back to the invention of the typewriter, in 1868.
In that year, Christopher Sholes, director of a local newspaper in Milwaukee, decided to distribute the keys in three rows in that way to prevent the shafts of the most used letters (such as "a" and "b") from crossing each other if typed in a short time interval from each other. This distribution, only apparently random, allowed for faster writing, alternating the most used letters with the less frequent ones and making the hammers less likely to get stuck together.
With the birth of the first electric keyboards, the problem of intertwining the hammers obviously no longer existed and therefore attempts were made to speed up the process even more by changing the order of the keys. But all attempts failed because the habit of using the "Qwerty" keyboard, which takes its name from the first six letters in the top left, had become entrenched. So the keyboard retained the shape that Sholes had given it in the second half of the nineteenth century, and which is still present on the "virtual" keyboards of new smartphones or tablets.
The arrangement of the letters today varies depending on the language, but there are very few keys that change position from one version to another. Italy immediately became accustomed to the English-speaking Qwerty keyboard, while in Germany they speak of the Qwertz keyboard and in France of Azerty: their names themselves clearly suggest how the letters are distributed.
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