Why QWERTY Keypad ?

Why was computer keyboards designed in the current format not in a alphabetical order. Is their any specific reason or it's just some random convention we are following?

 

 

Well I shall give you an alternative and sound perspective towards it. In Economics we classify such development under the role of "History & Expectation" and the story emerges out of there only. There is a classical paper by Paul A David of Stanford on this and i shall draw heavily from it hereafter. I have described certain developments under 4 heads which i think are important for an comprehensive understanding leading you to understand the present prevalence of qwerty design and tried giving you an analytical perspective to it.

              1 & 2 are a kind of eye opener since many had argued it's for fun, it's the best and other arguments. These 2 paragraphs would led you to understand what's the actual case regarding qwerty and how the free market hypothesis becomes redundant here to explain things. Next in 3 i have described how did the qwerty set up spread unknowingly or say informally. This could be understood via the analogy that one can draw regarding the "obvious" of practices or things in our general economics environment. while in 4 i have xplained how the above three have led to where we are, citing sound economic reasons explaining the business behavior. it's long but it would help you understand the matter in fine details and the economics behind it. happy reading :) 

1.QWERTY isn't the most efficient typing arrangement among all other possibilities.During the 1940's U.S. Navy experiments had shown that the increased efficiency obtained with DSK (the Dvorak Simplified

Keyboard) would amortize the cost of retraining a group of typists within the first ten days of their subsequent full-time employment. 

2.The agents engaged in production and purchase decisions in today's keyboard market are also not the prisoners of custom, conspiracy, or state control as theorized by others in popular Devil theory or typewriter's Oligopoly theory. But while they are, as we now say, perfectly "free to choose," their behavior, nevertheless, is held fast in the grip of events long forgotten and shaped by circumstances in which neither they nor their interests figured.

3. One should attend to the fact that during 1890s typewriters were beginning to take their place as an element of a larger, rather complex system of production that was technically interrelated.In addition to the manufacturers and buyers of typewriting machines, this system involved typewriter operators and the variety of organizations (both private and public that undertook to train people in such skills. Still more critical to the outcome was the fact that, in contrast to the hardware subsystems of which QWERTY or other keyboards were a part, the larger system of production was nobody's design.

4. Also during late 1880s advent of "touch" typing, a distinct advance over the four-finger hunt-and-peck method,  was critical, because this innovation was from its inception adapted to the Rernington's QWERTY keyboard. Touch typing gave rise to three features of the evolving production system which were crucially important in causing QWERTY to become "locked in" as the dominant keyboard arrangement. These features were technical interrelatedness, economies of scale, and quasi-irreversibility of investment.

(a) Technical Interrelatedness: In layman's terms there is the need

for system compatibility between keyboard "hardware" and the "software" represented by the touch typist's memory of a particular arrangement of the keys, this called for complementarity of production and economic activities in tandem with the QWERTY set up. This informally lead to implicit dominance of qwerty designs.

(b) Economies of scale:  Now a purchase by a potential employer of a QWERTY keyboard conveyed a positive pecuniary externality (monetary gains) to compatibly trained touch typists. To the degree to which this increased the likelihood that subsequent typists would choose to learn QWERTY, in preference to another method for which the stock of compatible hardware would not be so large, the overall user costs of a typewriting system based upon QWERTY (or any specific keyboard) would tend to decrease as it gained in acceptance relative to other systems.

These decreasing cost conditions-or system scale economies-had a number of consequences, among which undoubtedly the most important was the tendency for the process of inter system competition to lead towards standardization through the predominance of a single keyboard design.

(c) Quasi-irreversibility of investment: Now despite eligible supreme arrangements available as DSK the historical accident had put qwerty on a higher ladder.This set up flourished over rivals merely because the purchasers of

the software (and/or the hardware) expected that it would do so since the cost of deviating from it was huge and may subsequently downplay the investment.The high costs of software "conversion" and the resulting quasi-irreversibility of investments in specific touch typing skills had made the qwerty kind of locked in.