Why are the letters on a keyboard in the order that they are?

Answer by  Binome (1975)

The QWERTY layout was originally designed so that, when using a typewriter, letters that were commonly placed next to one another in a word were not next to one another on the keyboard. This was to prevent the typewriter from jamming. The layout has just sort of stuck.

Answer by  KC (19)

When typewriters were in use, originally the keyboard letters were laid out in alphabetical order. However, the speed attained by typers would cause the keys to hit each other and stick. The key positions were changed in order to fix this problem, and slow average typing speed down.