QWERTY Keyboard (Edited from Wikipedia) SUMMARY QWERTY is a keyboard layout for Latin-script alphabets. The name comes from the order of the first six keys on the top left letter row of the keyboard (Q W E R T Y). The QWERTY design is based on a layout created for the Sholes and Glidden typewriter and sold to Remington in 1873. It became popular with the success of the Remington No. 2 of 1878, and remains in widespread use. HISTORY The QWERTY layout was devised and created in the early 1870s by Christopher Latham Sholes, a newspaper editor and printer who lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In October 1867, Sholes filed a patent application for his early writing machine he developed with the assistance of his friends Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soulé. The first model constructed by Sholes used a piano-like keyboard with two rows of characters arranged alphabetically The construction of the "Type Writer" had two flaws that made the product susceptible to jams. Firstly, characters were mounted on metal arms or typebars, which would clash and jam if neighboring arms were pressed at the same time or in rapid succession. Secondly, its printing point was located beneath the paper carriage, invisible to the operator, a so-called "up-stroke" design. Consequently, jams were especially serious, because the typist could only discover the mishap by raising the carriage to inspect what had been typed. The solution was to place commonly used letter-pairs (like "th" or "st") so that their typebars were not neighboring, avoiding jams. Sholes struggled for the next five years to perfect his invention, making many trial-and- error rearrangements of the original machine's alphabetical key arrangement. The study of bigram (letter-pair) frequency by educator Amos Densmore, brother of the financial backer James Densmore, is believed to have influenced the array of letters, but the 1 contribution was later called into question. Others suggest instead that the letter groupings evolved from telegraph operators' feedback. In November 1868 he changed the arrangement of the latter half of the alphabet, O to Z, right-to-left. In April 1870 he arrived at a four-row, upper case keyboard approaching the modern QWERTY standard, moving six vowel letters, A, E, I, O, U, and Y, to the upper row. In 1873 Sholes's backer, James Densmore, successfully sold the manufacturing rights for the Sholes & Glidden Type-Writer to E. Remington and Sons. The keyboard layout was finalized within a few months by Remington's mechanics. After they purchased the device, Remington made several adjustments, creating a keyboard with essentially the modern QWERTY layout. These adjustments included placing the "R" key in the place previously allotted to the period key. The QWERTY layout became popular with the success of the Remington No. 2 of 1878, the first typewriter to include both upper and lower case letters, using a shift key. DVORAK KEYBOARD The Dvorak Simplified Keyboard is a keyboard layout patented during 1936 by Dr. August Dvorak and his brother-in-law, Dr. William Dealey. Several modifications have since been designed. These variations have been collectively or individually termed the Simplified Keyboard or American Simplified Keyboard, but they all have come to be known commonly as the Dvorak keyboard or Dvorak layout. Dvorak proponents claim the layout requires less finger motion and reduces errors compared to the standard pattern, the QWERTY keyboard. It is claimed that the reduction in finger distance traveled permits faster rates of typing while also reducing repetitive strain injuries, although that claim is controversial. The Dvorak layout was designed to replace the QWERTY keyboard pattern (the de facto standard keyboard layout, so named for the starting letters in the top row). The Dvorak pattern was designed with the belief that it would significantly increase typing speeds with respect to the QWERTY layout. Dvorak believed that there were many problems with the original QWERTY keyboard pattern. 2 Dvorak studied letter frequencies and the physiology of people's hands and created a pattern to alleviate the problems he believed were part of the QWERTY pattern. The pattern he created adheres to these principles Although the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard (DSK) has failed to replace the standard QWERTY keyboard pattern, most major modern operating systems (such as Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, Chrome OS, and BSD) allow a user to switch to the Dvorak layout. Neither iOS nor BlackBerry 10 provide a system-wide, touchscreen Dvorak keyboard, although third-party software is capable of adding the pattern to both iOS and Blackberry 10. 3.