A couple of months ago, I got a new keyboard for the computer in my office. I got a QWERTY keyboard. Today just about everyone knows what that is. If you read the title of this blog entry, you probably immediately knew that it is the top row of letters on a standard typewriter (if you know that that is) or computer keyboard. The QWERTY configuration has an interesting history.
Back in the 1870s one of the leading manufacturers of typewriters was a company by the name of Sholes & Co. They apparently received lots and lots of complaints from users about the typewriter keys sticking together if the operator went too fast. (If this doesn’t make sense to you, you’re too young to be reading this blog — go text someone, or something.) But anyhow, management asked their engineers to fix the problem. After some discussion, they suggested slowing the operator down. If they did that, the keys wouldn’t jam together nearly as much. Their solution was to have an inefficient keyboard configuration. For instance, the letters “O” and “I” are the third and sixth most frequently used letters in the English language. So the engineers positioned them on the keyboard so that the relatively weaker ring and little fingers had to depress them. Believe it or not, this brilliant idea solved the problem of keyboard jam-up.
Of course, since then the state of the art in typewriter and computer/word processing technology has advanced majorly. Most modern keyboards can probably go much faster than any human operator can type. Today, there are other, faster configurations available, but the QWERTY continues to the most popular.
I guess that just proves that it’s easy to get “set in our ways.” Once something becomes “standard,” it’s very difficult to change it even though the original reason for it has disappeared. So if you’re into creative thinking, you have to not only generate new ideas, but figure out how to escape the obsolete ones as well.
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