I'm currently reading Paulo Coelho's Veronika Decides to Die. And it seems like all of us have to be a little crazy in order to really live. It makes sense in a weird way.
And wondered why the QWERTY keyboard is like that? I've always wondered why the inventor/s of the typewriter did not arrange the keys alphabetically to make typing easier. The book explains it too:
The first [typewriting] machine was invented by Christopher Sholes, in 1873, to improve on calligraphy, but there was a problem: If a person typed very fast, the keys got stuck together and stopped the machine from working. Then Sholes designed the QWERTY keyboard, a keyboard that would oblige typists to type more slowly.
Source: Veronika Decides to Die, Paulo Coelho, p. 167
And the QWERTY stuck because if they changed it now, no one would buy the product because people just got used to the QWERTY keyboard. And they can type on it fast now too.
I wonder if that's true. If it is, its kind of weird, because whenever we ask why keys on the keyboard are not arranged alphabetically, we would always just assume that it's arranged in a way that would enable persons to type faster. And not the other way around. Crazy huh
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
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