2300: Rocky Origins of QWERTY Apr 3, 2021

The Sholes and Glidden typewriter, marketed as the Remington No. 1, saw the introduction of the QWERTY keyboard, so named for its arrangement of four rows of keys. in the order we are familiar with now around the globe. It was not until the Remington No. 2 however that this would gain any popularity. For one thing, it only had capital letters, and it was not possible to see what was being written as one wrote, known as a blind writer. It was also expensive and took training to operate, with all of these factors and generally poor marketing leading to a popular lack of enthusiasm. Still, the 1874 design did lay the foundation for its more successful successor, and now ubiquity among the adoption of its keyboard layout, at least with English. Other languages such as French will use different arrangements of keys for the same keyboard; in the case of French it is known as the AZERTY. In both cases, there were competitors who introduced other layouts, but these never caught on.