Small tribute to the keyboard. The forgotten component

Linux users have spent decades battling printers, video cards and network cards. However, there is a component that hardly ever causes problems and that's probably why we never talk about it. Keyboard

I have been hearing that the keyboard is going to be replaced by the voice or even the thought since nineteen eighty-five. Anyway, it's still with us. Even in that nightmare for those of us who have thick fingers that is the virtual keyboard of the mobile.

Small tribute to the keyboard

Victim of coffee showers, sticky fingers of children, passion of players or anger of writers of emails or comments. And, in some cases with more dirt between your keys than the Humid pampas.  The keyboard continues to work until it stops working and is replaced by another. Generally cheaper than the Chinese industry usually offers.

The origin of our keyboard

Most of us know that our keyboard layout was inherited from the typewriter.. What is not so clear is where the typewriters got it.

The most popular belief is that the layout of the keys on early typewriters had to be changed because if a user quickly typed in a succession of letters whose typographic bars were close to each other, the delicate machinery would jam.

According to this, the QWERTY layout (Named for the first letters of the first row) eIt is designed to maximize the separation of the most common letter pairs in the English language.

Connoisseurs of the English language refute this theory based on the er key combination being the fourth most used.

There is another version that lovers of open source will be familiar with. Remington, one of the first manufacturers of typewriters, did not limit itself to producing typewriters but also offered training courses, which were paid separately. The typists who learned with their patented system weren't going to pay and take a course again when they switched brands. This required companies that wanted to hire skilled typists to purchase Remington products.

Any similarity to what Microsoft did with computer science schools more than a century later is purely coincidental.

Anyway, in 1893, the five largest typewriter manufacturers - Remington, Caligraph, Yost, Densmore, and Smith-Premier- joined the Union Typewriter Company and agreed to adopt QWERTY as the standard.

The most probable theory

In 2011, Japanese researchers came up with what appears to be the strongest explanation for why such an unintuitive keyboard layout was adopted.

Researchers give an example

El Morse code represents Z as '- - -', which is often confused with the SE digram, more frequently used than Z. Sometimes Morse receivers in the United States cannot determine whether Z or SE applies, especially in the first letter (s) of a word, before receiving subsequent letters. Therefore, the S should be placed near the Z and the E on the keyboard so that Morse receivers can type them quickly (for the same reason that the C should be placed near the EI). But, in fact, C was more often confused with S).

That is, the purpose of QWERTY was never to avoid mechanical problems or to tie users to a proprietary typing method or company products. (Although I don't think the Remingtons were complaining about an advantage that a captive clientele provided them)

In any case, it is well worth asking ourselves if it makes sense to continue to maintain this provision.


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