The origin of keyboard letter arrangement
The order of keyboard letters is sorted according to the frequency of use of letters. Careful readers may wonder: Why are the 26 letters arranged in such an irregular manner? It is both difficult to memorize and master. The reason is said to be this:
In the 1870s, Shores Company was the largest manufacturer specializing in typewriters at the time. Because the mechanical technology at that time was not perfect, the rebound speed of the keys after being hit was slow. Once the typist hit the keys too fast, it was easy for the two keys to be twisted together. They had to be carefully moved by hand. They separate, severely affecting typing speed. For this reason, the company often receives complaints from customers.
In order to solve this problem, designers and engineers worked hard. Later, a smart engineer suggested that the reason why the typewriter keys are twisted is that the keys rebound slowly, and the typist is too fast. Since we can't increase the rebound speed, why don't we think of ways to reduce the typing speed?
This is undoubtedly a new idea. There are many ways to slow down a typist. The simplest way is to scramble the order of the 26 letters and place the more commonly used letters under clumsy fingers. For example, the letters "O", "S", and "A" are It is used very frequently, but it is hit with the clumsiest ring finger of the right hand, ring finger of the left hand and little finger of the left hand. The less frequently used letters such as "V", "J" and "U" are handled by the most flexible index finger.
As a result, this "QWERTY" combination keyboard was born and gradually took shape. Later, due to the development of materials and technology, the rebound speed of the keys was much faster than the typist's keystroke speed, but the alphabetical order of the keyboard could not be changed. So far, many more reasonable alphabetical order design solutions have appeared, but none of them can be promoted. This shows how powerful the power of social habits is.
In addition, keyboard also refers to keyboard instruments, such as electronic keyboards, pianos, etc. When a band performs live, many sound effects (such as the sound of strings in rock music) need to be simulated by an electronic keyboard or electronic piano. The player responsible for this type of instrument is called a "keyboard player."
Today, the most commonly used input devices for personal computers are the keyboard and mouse.
The universal 101-key or 102-key keyboard is named according to the arrangement of English letters and is called a QWERTY keyboard. There is no doubt that it was "born out" of the English typewriter. Bill Gates once used this keyboard to illustrate what a "de facto" standard is: "The order of letters on English typewriters and computer keyboards is QWER?TY. There is no law saying that they must be arranged this way. But they do. Effectively, most users will stick to this standard. Interestingly, this arrangement is not a reasonable layout.
The inventor of the QWERTY keyboard is Christopher Sholes (C. Sholes), who lived during the American Civil War in the 19th century and was the editor of the "Milwaukee News". With the assistance of his friend Saul, Shores developed a page numbering machine and obtained a patent for the invention. Glidden, a colleague at the newspaper office, suggested that he further develop the typewriter on this basis and found him experimental data from the British.
After years of hard work by Shores and two partners, in 1860, they made a prototype of the typewriter. However, Shores discovered to his dismay that his machine would not work properly if he typed even slightly faster. As a rule, Shores arranged the 26 English letters on the keyboard in the order of ABCDEF. In order to make the typed words one by one, the keys should not be too far apart. In this case, as long as the finger movement is slightly faster, the metal rods connecting the keys will interfere with each other. In order to overcome the interference phenomenon, Shores rearranged the positions of the letter keys, placing commonly used letters as far apart as possible to extend the finger movement process.
The abnormal thinking method turned out to be successful. Sholes excitedly typed a line of letters: "The first blessing, dedicated to all men, and especially to all ladies." Sholes "especially" dedicated his invention to women. He wanted to They created an unprecedented new profession - "typist". On June 23, 1868, the U.S. Patent Office officially accepted the typewriter invention patent jointly registered by Shores, Glidden, and Saul.
From today's perspective, the keyboard letter arrangement invented by Shores has too many shortcomings.
For example, 8 of the 10 most commonly used letters in English are too far away from the prescribed finger position, which is not conducive to improving typing speed; in addition, there are too many letters on the keyboard that need to be typed with the left hand, because most people are "right-handed" "zi", so it is very awkward to use. Someone once made statistics that using a QWERTY keyboard, a skilled typist's fingers can move up to 25.7 kilometers in 8 hours. However, QWERTY remains the "de facto" standard for computer keyboards today. Although A. Dvorak, a professor at the University of Washington, designed the DVORAK keyboard with a more scientific key arrangement in 1932, it never became popular.