My laptop has a British keyboard, which means I probably have a few more keys than you do. And the keys that are the same are not all in exactly the same places. If you were to borrow my laptop you might take a moment or two to find the quotation marks or the @ sign. But most of the letters are where you’d expect them to be. It’s still a QWERTY keyboard. This arrangement of keys was invented in 1873 by a Milwaukee newspaper editor named Christopher Sholes. He invented it for the express purpose of slowing typists down so they wouldn’t jam the keys of their ribbon-and-hammer typewriters. QWERTY deliberately puts the letters we hit most frequently under weaker, slower fingers. The typewriter has been out of date so long most of my readers have never used one. And it’s impossible to type too fast for a computer. So why do we still use the QWERTY keyboard?
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