Millions of people around the globe use keyboards every day. As computer use increases, keyboards are everywhere. Typing away every day, you probably never think about the humble origins of your modern keyboard. As you might guess, today's computer keyboard is modeled partially on the old-fashioned typewriter.
Typewriter roots
Today's keyboard layout is based on the typewriter patented by Christopher Sholes in the mid-1870s. The QWERTY layout is designed around the most- and least-used letters in traditional typing. The idea of the QWERTY layout is that the most frequently used letters are scattered around the keyboard so that the type bars in mechanical typewriters came from different directions and didn't jam during typing. It's also designed to slow the speed at which a user can type. Although mechanical jams aren't an issue with computer keyboards, typing was taught in so many schools over the years with QWERTY keyboards that it was natural to continue using the layout for computers.
The Dvorak keyboard
When electric typewriters came out in the mid-1930s, August Dvorak patented a new keyboard layout to reduce typing strain by placing the most commonly used letters in the home row. Unfortunately, almost all of the keys from the QWERTY keyboard moved in the Dvorak redesign, so retraining on the Dvorak keyboard could take a month or more for most typists. In spite of typing tests proving that the Dvorak layout is faster, most people are unwilling to retrain and the Dvorak keyboard has never been able to overtake QWERTY in popularity. Programmers and IT administrators are the primary audience for this layout, which many consumers have never even seen.
Transition from typewriter to electronic keyboard
A few key inventions helped ease the transition between old-fashioned typewriters and the modern computer keyboard. The teletype was a marriage of the typewriter and telegraph, while another application took a punch system combined with a typewriter to create a keypunch. An early computer in the mid-1940s used a card-punch system to input and output data, while a computer in the late 1940s went a step further and used an electric typing device to create magnetic tape to feed data to the computer. These intermediary technologies paved the path between the mechanical typewriter and the electronic input device you use in modern computing.
Multics and the modern keyboard
In the mid-1960s, the keyboard took the final step to becoming the modern device we know when MIT, Bell Laboratories and General Electric worked together to create Multics. Multics was a multiuser computer system, and its development led to the invention of the video display terminal (VDT) so that users could easily input text to program and use computers. With the development of the VDT and a keyboard that sent electronic impulses directly to the computer, bypassing the punch system or magnetic tape formerly used, the modern keyboard was born. The VDT and electronic keyboard made it possible to input and manipulate data directly and became the prototype for modern computing.
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