I was always afraid as a child of coming across a kids book where a lead character would be called Qwerty Uiop. As much as I enjoyed The Phantom Tollbooth I was well aware of where this, and Lewis Carroll’s, mixture of fun and learning would take us. Pete’s Adventures In Typing luckily never occurred, not did Tom In Macroeconomicsland.
Nevertheless, the Qwerty keyboard is one of those wonderful inventions whose genesis is taken a bit for granted and we are not all that sure if it really works. Supposedly spaced for optimum typing ability, its invention was made before any real work in ergonomics or computing had been made. Some might say without Qwerty it would hard to so any work in ergonomics and computing at all (these people are are stupid and should not be listened to however).
Nevertheless the Qwerty keyboard is another English-centric design that has invaded the world, needing hundred of function key shifts or pictogramatical languages and Russian keyboards which look bizarre to Western eyes. So it is fitting that Russians have invented the keyboard where each key is a monitor. I thought this was a remarkably rubbish idea, until I saw the article and saw all the potentials for foreign language use, gaming etc. The only real problem is that you aren’t really supposed to look at the keys when typing anyway (yeah right!)