2892: Keyboard Spacing Oddities Nov 21, 2024

English QWERTY keyboards, of course, have 26 letter keys and several others, which are often uniquely sized, partly to address the following problem. Of the 26 letters, they are arranged into rows of 10, 9, and 7 (descending), and above them, the row of numbers is not evenly spaced. Of these four rows, the top two and bottom two have their pairs spaced roughly half a key's length apart, but in the middle of these two pairs, the spacing is different, closer to one-third or one-quarter of a key's length.

This is a vestige of typewriters. Since traditional typewriters used physical keys that stamped an ink-soaked ribbon onto paper, the levers had to be spaced irregularly to prevent jamming. There was no reason, per se, for computer keyboards to maintain this arrangement, and in fact, the daisy wheel of electric typewriters had already rendered this feature obsolete. However, it remained the standard because it was familiar to users, and there was no incentive to change. The only difference between old typewriter keyboards and modern ones, besides the computer-specific commands on the spacebar row or above the numbers, is that keys like Shift and Return are now given specific sizes to fit into a rectangular layout. But again, this practice had already been established by the time of electric typewriters.