Prefer column staggered, but yes they really make you wonder how we got stuck with the dominant keyboard configurations. Typing with linear columns feels way more natural.
They had bars that needed to physically move, and so staggering them helped them not collide and get jammed.
If you imagine a bar coming from the center of each key towards your screen, you can see how the staggering was helpful. For instance, M misses J and K above it, naturally, but it also slightly misses I and the 8 above that.
It’s a great solution for a nonexistent problem in keyboards.
It probably really helped people who learned to type on a typewriter make the first changeovers, and now it’s what everybody learns to type on for the most part so it hasn’t budged. I’ve noticed at work that my gen z coworkers often struggle to type out a solid nursing note (most of them learned to type on a phone screen) so I wonder if this is maybe an opportunity for more of those alternative layouts to start taking hold as typing becomes a less common thing people need to learn early on.
Wasn’t the whole idea to minimize the amount of times your typewriter seized up? Happened often enough with QWERTY keyboards when it came to the cheap typewriters. Yes, I’m old.
That is why the letters are all in a funny order, but that’s not why the keys were staggered. They were staggered because of the mechanical linkages underneath the keys, so the linkages could be made straight rather than having to bend around other keys in the way.
Prefer column staggered, but yes they really make you wonder how we got stuck with the dominant keyboard configurations. Typing with linear columns feels way more natural.
Typewriters.
They had bars that needed to physically move, and so staggering them helped them not collide and get jammed.
If you imagine a bar coming from the center of each key towards your screen, you can see how the staggering was helpful. For instance, M misses J and K above it, naturally, but it also slightly misses I and the 8 above that.
It’s a great solution for a nonexistent problem in keyboards.
It probably really helped people who learned to type on a typewriter make the first changeovers, and now it’s what everybody learns to type on for the most part so it hasn’t budged. I’ve noticed at work that my gen z coworkers often struggle to type out a solid nursing note (most of them learned to type on a phone screen) so I wonder if this is maybe an opportunity for more of those alternative layouts to start taking hold as typing becomes a less common thing people need to learn early on.
Wasn’t the whole idea to minimize the amount of times your typewriter seized up? Happened often enough with QWERTY keyboards when it came to the cheap typewriters. Yes, I’m old.
That is why the letters are all in a funny order, but that’s not why the keys were staggered. They were staggered because of the mechanical linkages underneath the keys, so the linkages could be made straight rather than having to bend around other keys in the way.