> That, I’m afraid, is because ASCII was based not on modern computer keyboards but on the shifted positions of a Remington No. 2 mechanical typewriter – whose

> That, I’m afraid, is because ASCII was based not on modern computer keyboards but on the shifted positions of a Remington No. 2 mechanical typewriter – whose shifted layout was the closest compromise we could find as a standard at the time, I imagine. According to Wikipedia¹, American typewriters were pretty consistent with keyboard layout until the IBM Selectric electric typewriter. Apparently "small" characters (like apostrophe, double-quote, underscore, and hyphen) should be typed with less pressure to avoid damaging the platen, and IBM decided the Selectric could be simpler if those symbols were grouped on dedicated keys instead of sharing keys with "high pressure" symbols, so they shuffled the symbols around a bit, resulting in a layout that would look very familiar to a modern PC user. Because IBM electric typewriters were so widely used (at least in English speaking countries), any computer company that wanted to sell to businesses wanted a Selectric-style layout, including the IBM PC. Meanwhile, in other countries where typewriters in general weren't so popular or useful, the earliest computers had ASCII-style punctuation layout for simplicity, and later computers didn't have any pressing need to change, so they stuck with it. Japanese keyboards, for example, are still ASCII-style to this day. ¹: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Selectric#Keyboard_layout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Selectric#Keyboard_layout