QWERTY 键盘布局的发展历史
在我最初学习键盘打字时，曾今为看似随机的键盘字母排列困惑不已。当时为找到一个字母就需要看半天键盘，我觉得键盘按字母表次序排列不好吗？当时流行的解释是：机械键盘在输入时，一些常用的字母组合的连杆，在快速连续击打时容易卡在一起。所以，现在的 QWERTY 排列“旨在降低打字速度”。这个说法至今广为流传，而我最近读了一篇 Koichi Yasuoka 和 Motoko Yasuoka 写的论文《 On the Prehistory of QWERTY 》，更清晰的描述了 QWERTY 键盘的发展脉络，我觉得可信度更高。
论文分两个部分，第一部分阐述了先进流行的 QWERTY 键盘是怎样演变到今天的布局的，第二部分驳斥了“旨在降低打字速度”的说法。后者源于 1980 年东京大学 Hisao Yamada 教授发表的论文《 A Historical Study of Typewriters and Typing Methods 》。论文中有这么一段话： ：
Hence the original keyboard arrangement of 1873 was experimentally arrived at by Sholes in part by arranging the typebars for some frequent digrams in the English language at opposite locations across the round basket. At the same time, in the empirical process, the keyboard arrangement was unintentionally made more difficult to type fast on.
这段话被一些书和论文（例如 Keyboard Entry—Can It Be Simplified? ）转述时被错误理解为：
Historians of typewriter design agree, the current QWERTY arrangement was arrived at by Sholes and his associates to satisfy mechanical restraints, and was intended to slow down the operator so that type bars would not jam.
