lsanderson | The Promise and Peril of ‘Smart’ Keyboards

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Published: August 13, 2010

Analog culture is stored in our muscle memories. Even as artifacts of the predigital world disappear, we haven’t forgotten the moves. How to crank up a car window. How to ease up on a clutch. How to put a needle on a record.

Among the 20th-century activities our muscles can’t forget is typing on a qwerty keyboard. And though most people who type now don’t know the meaning of a typebar jam — much less the inky aggravation — the configuration of characters that begins with the row q-w-e-r-t-y-u-i-o-p, first marketed for typewriters in 1874 to reduce such jams, is still the most common configuration in the world for English-language keyboards. More