Take a look down at your keyboard - if you spend even a little of your time using a computer during

Take a look down at your keyboard - if you spend even a little of your time using a computer during the day, you’re probably a little familiar with the seemingly random way the keys are mapped out. This layout, seen all over the world today, is referred to as QWERTY, after the first six letters in the top left of the board. Why not something more intuitive?

The reality is that it’s a carryover from the days of typewriters. The keys on typewriters moved a lot more than today’s button-like ones, and were prone to getting jammed together if you rapidly pushed two keys that were adjacent to each other. To counteract this, the keys were mapped with the most commonly used letters placed far away from each other to lessen the likelihood of jamming. 

Today’s keys are a lot less likely to get stuck together, and they have been even since the 1940’s. The Dvorak keyboard layout (Developed by Dr. August Dvorak in 1932) was designed to allow typing with much less lateral movement by placing all of the most commonly used keys on the home and top rows, leaving the rarer keys to sit on the bottom row (the hardest row to reach, relatively speaking). You can see this in the second image above, with the five English vowels all on the left-hand home row and the Y just nearby. This much more intuitive layout allows for faster and more accurate typing with less stress on the typist’s hands and wrists.

Unfortunately, it has yet to catch on en masse over 70 years later - schools don’t teach it because businesses don’t use it, and businesses don’t use it because schools don’t teach it. The good news is that there are websites thatdo, and all of the commonly used operating systems in the world have the Dvorak layout available as a setting. In the meantime, Viva la Hand Cramps!