Why are the keys on a computer keyboard not arranged in alphabetical order?
The keyboard keys are arranged the way they are because of how old fashioned typewriters worked. Old style typewriters had little hammers attached to each key. On the end of the hammer was a raised character. When you pressed down on the key, the hammer would come up quickly and strike a ribbon saturated in ink that floated just slightly above the paper. The raised character would transfer that character to the paper. In order for the text to appear uniform and in a straight line, the hammers were designed to all strike the paper in about the same spot. This worked fine if you typed slowly one letter at a time… but if you typed really fast and hit two keys that were close together right in a rown, the key going up would hit the key coming down and the two keys would jam together. To address this, they keys were arranged on the keyboard in a manner in which the most commonly used characters were space as far apart as possible. This made it so that when you hit two commonly used keys,
