QWERTY
QWERTY is a keyboard layout for Latin script. The name comes from reading the first six keys appearing on the top left letter row of the keyboard (Q W E R T Y) from left to right. 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 use on electronic keyboards due to inertia, the difficulty of learning a layout that differs from the currently entrenched standard, the network effect of a standard layout, and the claim by some that alternatives fail to provide very significant advantages.
History and purposes
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 as follows:
