QWERTYUIOP
I’m sure most of us have heard the story that the common QWERTY keyboard was actually designed ( in 1872 by Christopher Sholes) to slow typing speeds and prevent the hammers on old mechanical typewriters from jamming. Of course, that doesn’t really factor in today. It’s hard to even find a mechanical typewriter with hammers in the wild, unless you are at a street fair and someone is selling custom poetry.
There have been other systems developed to speed typing since then, which could be of great advantage to us on our modern computer input systems. DVORAK is the most popular, but the story of the Turkish F layout is really interesting if you really want to go down a Google rabbit hole.
Unfortunately, QWERTY has the one most important thing there is going for it. Ubiquity. SO MANY of us have already done the work to learn the QWERTY system. And who has the time to go through that process again with a whole new layout? Even if you did, you would be tied to your own personal computer, because the rest of the world is still going to be QWERTY.
Perhaps in a far off point in the future, when we all live on Martian colonies and wear those slick silver onesies all of the 1950s sci-fi films have predicted, we will make the change en masse. But I doubt it.
Fun keyboard facts: You can type stewardesses with just your left hand, and polyphony with just your write. You can also type typewriter with just the top row of keys.
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