Why exactly do we still use qwerty style keyboards? We don’t use typewriters anymore.

Question

I honestly don’t get why the heck we use this stupid layout… please somebody help me understand.

In: 131

Answer 1

Institutional inertia is the long and short of it.

We started with typewriters in the QWERTY layout, and so we have keyboards in the QWERTY layout. There are alternatives like AZERTY and Dvorak, and probably some oddballs that I don’t know about, but the default is QWERTY because it always has been.

Trying to re-standardize to another layout would involve so much reconfiguring in terms of numerous industries, customer expectations, etc, etc.