At first, the keyboards of typewriters were arranged in alphabetical order, and typewriters were all-mechanical typing tools. Therefore, if the typing speed is too fast, some key combinations are easy to get stuck, so Christopher Latham Sholes invented the QWERTY keyboard layout. He put the most commonly used letters in the opposite direction to slow down the typing speed to the maximum extent and avoid being stuck. Shoals applied for a patent in 1868, and the first commercial typewriter with this layout was successfully put on the market in 1873.
QWERTY's keyboard key layout is very inefficient. For example, most typists are right-handed, but with the QWERTY keyboard, the left hand takes up 57% of the work. The two little fingers and the ring finger of the left hand are the weakest fingers, but they are used frequently. The utilization rate of letters in the middle column only accounts for about 30% of the whole typing workload, so in order to type a word, you often have to move your fingers up and down.
1888 An open typing competition was held in the United States. Ma Jialin, a court stenographer, showed his blind typing skills according to the clear division of fingering, and the mistakes were only three ten thousandths, which surprised the people present. According to records, Ma Jialin's bonus is 500 dollars. Since then, many people have followed this blind typing, and the United States has also begun to set up schools to train typists.
Because of the appearance of blind typing technology, the keystroke speed is enough to meet the needs of daily work. However, 60 years later (1934), a man named dvorak invented a new arrangement method, which enabled his left and right hands to alternately type more words. This keyboard can shorten the training period by 1/2 times and increase the average speed by 35%. Dvorak's keyboard layout principle is: 1, try to strike alternately with your left and right hands to avoid one-handed combo; 2. The average moving distance of verbal attack keys is the smallest; 3. The most commonly used letters should be ranked in the key position.
More reasonable and efficient than Dvorak keyboard is the malt keyboard invented by Lillian malt. It changes the staggered arrangement of the original keys, makes the thumb easier to use, and makes it easier to reach backspace and other keys that were originally far away from the center of the keyboard. But the malt keyboard needs special hardware to be installed on the computer, so it has not been widely used.