Qwerty POS Keyboard

The keyboard was designed to deliberately slow down typists, because the earliest manual typewriters tended to jam. QWERTY solved this by placing frequently used letter pairs far apart. Then, during the 1930s, a university professor named August Dvorak devised an alternative keyboard that placed the most frequently used letter pairs in a single row. Though Dvorak insisted his keyboard was much easier to learn and faster to type on, nobody switched to it because QWERTY had such a huge head start.

Full Line of Qwerty POS Keyboards

You might naively expect that the QWERTY keyboard was designed so that most typing is done on the home row. You would be wrong. Only 32 percent of strokes are on the home row; most strokes (52 percent) are on the upper row; and a full 16 percent are on the bottom row, which you should be avoiding like the plague. Not more than 100 English words can be typed without leaving the home row. The reason for this disaster is simple: QWERTY POS keyboard perversely puts the most common English letters on other rows. The home row of nine letters includes two of the least used (J and K) but none of the three most frequently used (E, T, and O, which are relegated to the upper row) and only one of the five vowels (A), even though 40 percent of all letters in a typical English text are vowels.

To appreciate the consequences of that misdesigning, just remind yourself of how it feels to type pumpkin or minimum on your QWERTY POS keyboard. Your fingers must not only reach from the home row to the top or bottom but must at times hurdle completely over the home row, moving directly from top to bottom and back again. Those awkward hurdles and reaches slow you and introduce typing errors and finger strain. Unfortunately, out of any 100 pairs of consecutive letters in a typical English text, six require a reach and four a hurdle on the QWERTY keyboard.

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