Why are keyboards not in alphabetical order?

The reason dates back to the time of manual typewriters. When first invented , they had keys arranged in an alphabetical order, but people typed so fast that the mechanical character arms got tangled up.

I believe that keyboards were arranged in alphabetical order during their origins, however someone changed it to make people type slower. Google "QWERTY keyboard" and it's history is bound to come up.

Like Mag said, the keys that got used frequently in rapid succession had a tendency to jam together, which happens somewhat less with QWERTY UIOP. Early linotypes actually used a keyborad with an English "frequency" matrix in the order of ETAOIN SHRLDU. When composers were unsure how much space to reserve for later copy-edit, you might see ETAOIN SHRLDU ETAION SHRLDU SHRLDU SHRLDU SHRLDU...

Coz that would be stupid! - It's better this way, or maybe not, but i think it's a lot better and the most used keys are closer to hands, and the wsad keys for gaming would be different!

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