Our story concerns the history of the standard typewriter keyboard, commonly known as QWERTY, and its more recent rival, the
Dvorak keyboard. Pick up the February 19 edition of Newsweek and there is Steve Wozniak, the engineering wunderkind largely responsible for Apple's early success, explaining that Apple's recent failures were just another example of a better product losing out to an inferior alternative: "Like the
Dvorak keyboard, Apple's superior operating system lost the market-share war." Ignoring for the moment the fact that just about all computer users now use sleek graphical operating systems much like the Mac's graphical interface (itself taken from Xerox), Wozniak cannot be blamed for repeating the keyboard story.
There are mainly two layouts for a computer keyboard--the Qwerty Keyboard and the
Dvorak Keyboard. However, several of the letters appear in the same position on both keyboards.