What thought process went in to each layout? Which typist was considered when putting the keys in their particular spots on the keyboard??
- QWERTY
- QWERTZ
- AZERTY
What thought process went in to each layout? Which typist was considered when putting the keys in their particular spots on the keyboard??
These layouts are language dependent and based on the relative letter frequencies:
QWERTY - English
QWERTZ - German
AZERTY - French
The reasons for using these other keyboard layouts is that the letters unique to those languages are present as keys on the keyboard rather than having to be accessed via codes or the character map program.
Though the French have proposed standardising on QWERTY:
in 1976, a QWERTY layout adapted to the French language was put forward as an experimental standard (NF XP E55-060) by AFNOR
[From the AZERTY page on Wikipedia]
It depends on what you used and learned first. That will be the best for you. Keyboard Layouts are all in their own way "the best". DVORAK for example is developed to reduce muscle fatigue by arranging the keys in a way they are most used. Maybe you should read this Wiki article about Keyboardlayouts to choose whichone is the best for you.
OK as I said earlier , its just User Preferences but some notable points are
Advantage of QWERTY would be
Disadvantage of QWERTY would be
One of the points which hasn't been considered in other answers is what the typist is typing. Some keyboards are better suited for some types of text.
In my country, we use QWERTZ (we just took german layout, removed umlauts and replaced them with our own specific letters) and ЉЊЕРТЗ keyboards and they are much more difficult to use when programming compared to QWERTY. On QWERTZ keyboards many keys often used in programming are tertiary functions of a button. That means that you have to press Alt Gr every time you want to type [] {} | @ \ and similar. That is a big problem when programming because such characters are used very often in programming languages.
On the other hand QWERTZ and AZERTY (Sorry, I never heard of AWERTY layout, so I can't comment on it.) are easier when typing texts. They often have characters such as ¼ (1/4) and other commonly used fractions, accent marks which can be used to create letters with diacritics, have a real dash (―), have old style division mark [it's name is obelus, plural obeli, you learn something new every day!] (÷), cross product mark (×), Numero sign (№) and other special use characters.
It is like religion. Some will say - this ... and swear on it, some will say - none whatsoever.
You can also find the ones using Dvorak or Colemak. They're a story of their own. For me, QWERTZ, but only because most keyboard in this part of the world are like that. If suddenly some other form came about, I'd start using that one.