So I’ve been meaning to do this experiment for a long time, but there has never been the perfect opportunity. Now however that I am *ahem* between jobs (read: an unemployed bum) I have the perfect opportunity to try this out without letting any other work suffer. So, Friday morning, I stepped into the void, and started pulling the keys off my keyboard like a lion guts its prey.
Let me take a pause in the story to explain a bit before I start to sound like a madman. Look down at your keyboard, did you know that the ordering the keys dates back over a century? It was developed in the 1870’s by a dude called Christopher Latham Sholes,and it was originally developed for his typewriter. His first typewriter had two rows of keys and everything was basically in alphabetical order. The problem was that typists would often jam the hammers together when they typed common letter combinations too quickly, e and r were close to each other, and so was t and h. To remedy this Sholes arranged the keys so common combinations were further apart, and thus so were their hammers, reducing jams and thus solving the problem forever! ...except it didn’t.
