Thursday, August 12, 2010

The nineteenth century millennium bug

The new series of Fry’s Turkish Delight opened with an examination of the qwerty keyboard.

The reason for one of its idiosyncratic 1870s compromises between logic & technological imperative was the desire to make it easy to type dates. Hence I is just below the 8 - & so of course is the 9.

Perhaps the inventor thought that keyboards would have ceased to be in use by the time we needed the O to be just below the 2.



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