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The old, mechanical typewriters had small hammers that hit an inked ribbon held against the paper on a platen. It was quite common for adjacent hammers to jam against one another, especially if one was going to the paper when the other was returning. This was a problem for good typists who then had to slow down to unjam the keys. The keyboard was designed so that letters that often went together in English words were not close together. There was also an attempt to save the least common letters for most peoples' weakest finger: q, z and x for the left hand little finger. It is not quite clear how the a ended up in that group.

Since the advent of electric typewriters and then the electronic ones, there have been attempts to change the order but people who have learned to use the QWERTY keyboard the hard way are reluctant to change.

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11y ago

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