the "qwerty" keyboard

     The "qwerty" keyboard is the keyboard you see before you on typewriters, word processors, and computers. The arrangement of the letters, I once read, long ago, was meant to slow typists down. That's right, to slow them down. A really fast typist, in days of yore when typewriters were mechanical, could cause the keys to jam. The typist would need to stop typing to unstick the keys, and might have typed an error directly onto the paper. For a serious letter this meant starting over from the beginning with a fresh sheet of paper--time-consuming , expensive, and wasteful. So a new keyboard was designed that would make it more difficult to type rapidly enough to jam the keys. I didn't pull this story out of thin air--I read it in a newspaper years ago. I suggest that it's worth the time a technical person might want to spend on it. Experimenting with new keyboard configurations would be easier now than it has ever been, and there are no mechanical limits to how fast anyone should type.