Why are keys on a qwerty keyboard arranged the way their are?

Answer 1

When typewriters were first invented, it used to be alphabetical, but because the keys and bars to strike the hammers that hit the paper were close to each other, they would often jam. The person to first invent the jam free keyboard for the keys that would be used most often to be further away from each other and then arranged the rows to have most used letters on the middle row, second most on the top, and least used on the bottom row of the alphabet section.

After decades of using this layout, it shifted to computers because it would be more expensive to teach everyone in the world a new layout then to just keep it the way it is. There are key layouts that were made to be more efficient, but they fail due to lack of popularity.

Answer 2

Their position on a standard QWERTY keyboard is a throwback to the time of mechanical typewriters. Placing commonly used letter-pairs (like "th" or "st") so that their typebars were not neighbouring, helped avoid jams. Although QWERTY today is considered to slow down typists, it was originally designed to speed up typing by preventing jams.