On the Prehistory of QWERTY

概要

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QWERTY keyboard is widely used for information processing nowadaysin Japan, United States, and other countries. And the most frequently askedquestion about the keyboard is: “Why are the letters of the keyboard arrangedthe way they are?” Several papers in the field of information processing answerthe question like this: “To slow down the operator.” It’s nonsense.In this paper we reveal the prehistory of QWERTY keyboard along the history of telegraph apparatus: Morse, Hughes-Phelps, and Teletype. The earlykeyboard of Type-Writer was derived from Hughes-Phelps Printing Telegraph,and it was developed for Morse receivers. The keyboard arrangement veryoften changed during the development, and accidentally grew into QWERTYamong the different requirements. QWERTY was adopted by Teletype in the1910’s, and Teletype was widely used as a computer terminal later.