Foreign Perspectives

Everywhere you go in the world today you’ll find a keyboard in the family QWERTY layout. Except in France.

That’s because the French style keyboard that was developed by Dvorak is a second generation keyboard design.

Way back in the early days of typewriters, the keys jammed frequently and to solve this problem the manufacturers adopted the now familiar QWERTY layout to slow down the speed of the earliest typists. Although the early problems were solved quickly enough, the design stuck across the world despite all attempts to update it with a more logical layout.

Meanwhile though in France, Dvorak came along after those initial problems were solved and developed a keyboard layout which equally balances the workload across both hands and thereby considerably speeds up typing. However, although it would obviously be a doddle to change over to that layout these days by simply changing the keys around and using a different driver, I suspect that we’ll be stuck with QWERTY until the day comes when we’re not using keyboards anymore.