12 Biggest Tech Myths You Hear All the Time


3. The QWERTY Keyboard Was Designed To Slow Typists Down

A lot of people claim that the QWERTY layout was designed to slow down typists and that only simpletons still use QWERTY, the sophisticated group having switched over to the DVORAK layout. 

The tale behind this goes like this - In the early days of the typewriter, in the 1870s, a newspaper editor was tired of how often his reporters' typewriters kept jamming, so he placed the keys so idiotically with respect to one another that even the quickest typists would be slowed down and jams would be reduced.

But in reality, the keys in QWERTY keyboard were laid out according to a combination of letter frequency and so that hitting common letter combinations like "t" and "h" would not cause internal jammage.

In the 1930s, a new keyboard was invented: the DVORAK, which put the five most frequently used vowels and the five most frequently used consonants in the middle row. But this didn’t become very popular.