QWERTY
QWERTY is the modern-day layout of letters on most English language computer keyboards and typewriter keyboards. It takes its name from the first six letters shown on the keyboard's top row of letters.
''The Qwerty Layout'\'
The QWERTY design was patented by Christopher Sholes in 1868, and sold to Remington in 1873, when it first appeared in typewriters. (This patent has since expired.)
Frequently-used pairs of letters were separated in an attempt to stop the typebars from intertwining and becoming stuck, thus forcing the typist to manually unstick the typebars and also frequently blotting the document. (The home row (ASDFGHJKL) of the QWERTY layout is thought to be a remnant of the old alphabetical layout that QWERTY replaced.) It also alternated keys between hands, allowing one hand to move into position while the other hand strikes a key. This sped up both the original double-handed hunt-and-peck technique and the later touch typing technique; however, single-handed words such as "stewardess" and "monopoly" show flaws in the alternation.
Minor changes to the arrangement are made for other languages; for example, German keyboards interchange the "Z" and "Y" keys because Z and A often appear next to each other in the German language; consecutively, they are known as QWERTZU keyboards. French keyboards interchange both "Z" and "Y" and "Q" and "A" and are known as AZERTY keyboards.
Tests have shown that other arrangements of keys leads to more efficient typing of typical English text, and the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard arrangement (1936) has had some success in that regard, but the QWERTY arrangement remains the most popular, largely due both to market inertia and to tests showing little significant performance difference between those who first learned to type on QWERTY and those who first learned to type on Dvorak (Sholes himself patented a different arrangement more similar to Dvorak's, but it never became popular).
For QWERTY typeists who are considering of switching to Dvorak, the experience may be painful because it will take more efforts than initial touch typing because of the retraining of finger muscle memory. Computer users will also need to unlearn the habit of pressing key-shortcuts (for example: ctrl-c for copy, ctrl-x for paste). This will have to be relearned separately. It is not unusual to find Dvorak typers who also touch type the QWERTY layout, often as a matter of QWERTY's ubiquity. The single most benefit reported by Dvorak users is the comfort Dvorak provides.
