> Very much about keyboards today is derived from strange quirks that were part of typewriters for very good reasons, but have never been properly reevaluated o

> Very much about keyboards today is derived from strange quirks that were part of typewriters for very good reasons, but have never been properly reevaluated once they were converted to electronical keyboards. Of course, the main goal likely has been to minimize friction for those users that were already used to typing on a typewriter. The original design is based on typewriters from the 1890s. Within a few decades the design constraints had already changed (hence e.g. the Dvorak layout, which is optimized for 1930s-style typewriters). Anyhow, after the original typewriter and mid-20th-century teletype machines https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/ASR-33_at_CHM.agr.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/ASR-33_a..., the biggest influences of modern keyboards are designers at IBM and German bureaucrats from about 1980. A number of features of the German DIN office equipment standards forced significant (frankly arbitrary and unnecessary) changes on anyone who wanted to keep selling computers in Germany. There was a wide variety in computer keyboard designs up through the 80s, and then somewhere in the mid-to-late 80s the IBM 101-key layout became entrenched, and we’ve been stuck with it ever since, except for marginal niche alternatives.