TECHNOLOGY
Goodbye QWERTY
No QWERTY talk
W
Michal Kubacki,
CEO of ETAOI
Systems and inventor
of the 5-TILES
keyboard, argues
that it is time for the
overhaul of QWERTY
keyboards
hen we talk
about legacy
technology,
we are usually
referring to the
square-box PCs still running
Windows 95 in the hidden
bowels of the company, or the
fact that so many software
systems still use a floppy disk
icon for the ‘save’ function. But
what about the interface that
was invented for 150-year-old
technology that is no longer in
use? You may be surprised to
find that you use it every day.
We are of course talking about
QWERTY, the keyboard layout
invented in the 1870’s for the
first generation of mechanical
typewriters. Typing machine
inventors, Christopher Sholes
and Carlos Glidden found that
a pure alphabetical layout was
too confusing and inefficient for
telegraph operators who were
transcribing messages from
Morse code. It is commonly
thought that the mechanical
function of the machine also
played a role, separating some
letter combinations in order to
prevent the arms from jamming.
In 1878 Sholes and vƖFFV