Think about it: what good is your computer without the keyboard? Just an overpriced hunk of plastics and metals? Let’s look at that oh-so-important keyboard a little closer. When and how was it invented? Why do you get doubles of some of the keys and not others? And, by the way, why does the keyboard layout start with QWERTY and not with ABCDEF?

Well, at the very beginning of the computer era, you wouldn’t recognize the early models since computers back then used punched cards to input and output data. An early computer programmer needed so many punch cards, it ended up looking like a deck of playing cards! But as computers got more sophisticated, the keyboard needed a lot more keys than just numbers and letters. In the 1980s, IBM took a scientific approach to come up with the perfect keyboard – they arranged a focus group!

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