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QWERTY is the most common modern-day keyboard layout for Latin script. The name comes from reading the first six keys appearing on the top left letter row of the keyboard from left to right. The QWERTY design is based on a layout created for the Sholes and Glidden typewriter and sold to Remington in 1873. It became popular with the success of the Remington No. 2 of 1878, and remains in use on electronic keyboards due to inertia, the difficulty of learning a layout that differs from the currently entrenched standard, the network effect of a standard layout and the claim by some that alternatives fail to provide very significant advantages.〔 The QWERTY keyboard has only one vowel (the letter A) on the home row, even though most English words contain a vowel, forcing the fingers to travel off the home row for most words. ==History and purposes== (詳細はChristopher Latham Sholes, a newspaper editor and printer who lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In October 1867, Sholes filed a patent application for his early writing machine he developed with the assistance of his friends Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soulé. The first model constructed by Sholes used a piano-like keyboard with two rows of characters arranged alphabetically as follows:〔 The construction of the "Type Writer" had two flaws that made the product susceptible to jams. Firstly, characters were mounted on metal arms or typebars, which would clash and jam if neighboring arms were pressed at the same time or in rapid succession. Secondly, its printing point was located beneath the paper carriage, invisible to the operator, a so-called "up-stroke" design. Consequently, jams were especially serious, because the typist could only discover the mishap by raising the carriage to inspect what had been typed. The solution was to place commonly used letter-pairs (like "th" or "st") so that their typebars were not neighboring, avoiding jams. Contrary to popular belief,〔http://www.maltron.com/media/lillian_kditee_001.pdf〕 the QWERTY layout was not designed to slow the typist down,〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=...at least one study indicates that placing commonly used keys far apart, as with the QWERTY, actually speeds typing, since consecutive letters are often typed with alternate hands )〕 but rather to speed up typing by preventing jams. There is also evidence that, aside from the issue of jamming, placing often-used keys farther apart increases typing speed, because it encourages alternation between the hands. There is another origin story in the Smithsonian that the qwerty keyboard was made for telegraph operators and has this layout to make it easy for the telegraph operator to work. 〔http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fact-of-fiction-the-legend-of-the-qwerty-keyboard-49863249/〕〔http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/the-lies-youve-been-told-about-the-origin-of-the-qwerty-keyboard/275537/〕〔 (On the other hand, in the German keyboard the Z has been moved between the T and the U to help type the frequent bigraphs TZ and ZU in that language.) Almost every word in the English language contains at least one vowel letter, but on the QWERTY keyboard only the vowel letter "A" is located on the home row, which requires the typist's fingers to leave the home row for most words. Sholes struggled for the next five years to perfect his invention, making many trial-and-error rearrangements of the original machine's alphabetical key arrangement. The study of bigram (letter-pair) frequency by educator Amos Densmore, brother of the financial backer James Densmore, is believed to have influenced the arrangement of letters, but was later called into question.〔Koichi Yasuoka: (The Truth of QWERTY ), entry dated August 01, 2006.〕 Others suggest instead that the letter arrangement evolved from telegraph operators' feedback. In November 1868 he changed the arrangement of the latter half of the alphabet, O to Z, right-to-left.〔Koichi and Motoko Yasuoka: Myth of QWERTY Keyboard, Tokyo: NTT Publishing, 2008. (pp.12-20 )〕 In April 1870 he arrived at a four-row, upper case keyboard approaching the modern QWERTY standard, moving six vowel letters, A, E, I, O, U, and Y, to the upper row as follows:〔Koichi and Motoko Yasuoka: Myth of QWERTY Keyboard, Tokyo: NTT Publishing, 2008. (pp.24-25 )〕 In 1873 Sholes's backer, James Densmore, successfully sold the manufacturing rights for the Sholes & Glidden Type-Writer to E. Remington and Sons. The keyboard layout was finalized within a few months by Remington's mechanics and was ultimately presented as follows:〔Koichi and Motoko Yasuoka: (On the Prehistory of QWERTY ), ZINBUN, No.42, pp.161-174, 2011.〕 After they purchased the device, Remington made several adjustments, creating a keyboard with essentially the modern QWERTY layout. These adjustments included placing the "R" key in the place previously allotted to the period key. It has been claimed that this change was made to let salesmen impress customers by pecking out the brand name "TYPE WRITER QUOTE" from one keyboard row. This claim is not formally substantiated,〔 but the odds of this occurring by chance are incredibly small. Additionally, there are only five English ten-letter words that can be spelled using just the letters in the top row: perpetuity, prerequire, proprietor, repertoire, and typewriter. Vestiges of the original alphabetical layout remained in the "home row" sequence DFGHJKL. The modern layout is: The QWERTY layout became popular with the success of the Remington No. 2 of 1878, the first typewriter to include both upper and lower case letters, using a shift key. A feature much less commented-on than the order of the keys is that the keys do not form a rectangular grid, but rather each column slants diagonally. This is because of the mechanical linkages – each key being attached to a lever, and hence the offset prevents the levers from running into each other – and has been retained in most electronic keyboards. Some keyboards, such as the Kinesis or TypeMatrix, retain the QWERTY layout but arrange the keys in vertical columns, to reduce unnecessary lateral finger motion.〔(Kinesis – Ergonomic Benefits of the Contoured Keyboard ) – Vertical key layout〕〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=TypeMatrix - The Keyboard is the Key )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「QWERTY」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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