The calling card of the personal computer was the keyboard, and now, we are carrying around pieces of glass on which we simulate the old QWERTY design. Are we going to keep that layout going? But if not, how might a new design develop? Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword. Sign In Subscribe. The researchers tracked the evolution of the typewriter keyboard alongside a record of its early professional users.
They conclude that the mechanics of the typewriter did not influence the keyboard design. Early adopters and beta-testers included telegraph operators who needed to quickly transcribe messages. However, the operators found the alphabetical arrangement to be confusing and inefficient for translating morse code.
The Kyoto paper suggests that the typewriter keyboard evolved over several years as a direct result of input provided by these telegraph operators. At the time, they already had electronic messaging systems which allowed users to send each other mail as long as they shared the same machine.
Mailboxes were basically text files to which you could append new messages at the bottom. Tomlinson was working with a protocol that enabled you to transfer files from one computer to another over the network, so he just tweaked this protocol so you could use it to append messages to existing files on remote machines.
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