Numbers on keyboard

[Cooky]

This may seem like an odd question....

Why are the numbers arranged differently on a computer keyboard, to those on a telephone or fax machine????

 

[IRstuff]

The computer keypad is arranged to be consistent with an adding machine, since that's what a computer really is and one of the earlies "killer" apps was the spreadsheet. Since this has nothing to do with dialing a phone, there is no reason to be compatible.

Additionally, the first touch tone phones were required to be backward compatible with pulse connections, which are slower than touch tone. This being the case, the keypad arrangement must be sufficiently different to ensure that fast-fingered bookkeepers would not much things up.

The QWERTY keyboard was designed specifically to make it difficult to type fast, since the initial typewriters' mechanical response was slow enough that they would jam if typing speed was too fast.

TTFN

 

[melone]

I thought the QWERTY keyboard breaks up the letters that are most often used, into locations that allow for rapid key strokes, i.e. no jamming.

 

[IRstuff]

OK, you got me... I don't know for a fact that it was intentionally designed to slow overall speed, but it was designed to minimize jamming and the net effect is slower typing, as demonstrated by the Dvorak keyboard:

http://web.mit.edu/jcb/

http://www/Dvorak/

TTFN