q - w - e - r - t , y - u - i - o - p, q - w - e - r - t , y - u - i - o - p, q - w - e - r - t , y - u - i - o - p . . .
It was boring to type the letters in the upper row of my typewriter keyboard 20 times, then go on to the next row. But it was even more boring to lie in bed and do nothing. So when the chicken pox forced me to stay home from school for two weeks, I used the time to learn touch typing. At age ten I, like millions of Americans each year, memorized the QWERTY keyboard (as it is called from its starting arrangement of letters).
At the time, I didn’t wonder about its arbitrariness and never asked myself why our standard keyboard uses the QWERTY arrangement instead of alphabetical order or any other obviously advantageous arrangement. Whatever the original reasons for our adopting QWERTY, however, we now seem firmly committed to it. The typewriter, and its successor the computer, are among the most widely used office machines in the Western world, and keyboard-related repetitive-strain injuries are among our most common industrial accidents.
Commitment is incessantly urged upon us fin de siècle twentieth- century Americans. Commitment to our spouses, our children, and our careers is held to be virtuous; lack of commitment is a common criticism. Yet commitment should be seen as morally neutral. After all, what one is committed to might be either good or bad; commitment to a destructive relationship, an unsatisfying job, or alcoholism deserves no praise. Often, commitment can mean nothing more than an involvement that has outlived its original justification. All of us have at one time or another felt trapped by such a commitment, longing for a happier, though uncertain, state of existence but fearing the short-term pain required to reach it.Commitment is a big issue not only for us as individuals, but for us as a culture as well. All human societies have many apparently arbitrary practices that persist for centuries or even millennia--writing systems, counting systems, sets of number signs, and calendars, to name just a few examples. At one time there existed alternatives to the system that we eventually adopted. Were some of these alternatives better than others? Did we in fact end up committed to the best ones? Are our alphabets, decimal counting, Arabic numerals, and Gregorian calendar really superior to Chinese logograms, Babylonian base-60 counting, Roman numerals, and the Mayan calendar?
Those questions are hard to answer for some of these choices-- counting systems, for instance--to which we became committed in the remote past. But the QWERTY keyboard is a modern-day commitment, dating back only to the late nineteenth century, and thus it is one whose history we can reconstruct. We know that QWERTY is the dominant survivor of dozens of keyboard designs that competed during the early years of the typewriter. Hence we can ask, with the expectation of finding an answer, to what advantages does it owe its triumph?
