The Reason Old Keyboards Say QWERTY Will Genuinely Annoy You
The most famous layout in the world was arguably designed to make you slower, not faster.
Look down at your keyboard right now. That jumbled top row of letters spelling QWERTY was not chosen by accident, and the story behind it is genuinely maddening.
Early typewriters used little metal arms that swung up to stamp each letter. When popular letter pairs sat too close together, the arms would collide and jam, forcing typists to stop and untangle them.
So the layout was rearranged to space out common letter combinations, keeping the swinging arms from crashing. Some historians argue this deliberately slowed typists down to protect the fragile machinery.
The machines that needed it vanished generations ago, yet the layout stuck around out of pure habit. You are typing on a solution to a problem that has not existed for well over a century.
