Maybe I’m not getting the joke, but it looks like the company New Standard Keyboards wants to sell us on keyboards that have a layout with keys in alphabetical order.

As I have blogged before, I’m using a keyboard in Dvorak layout with my desktop PC, and I have configured my laptop keyboard to Dvorak as well (I also swapped the keys around physically, which isn’t described in that article — I find it useful when I’m doing presentations and need to hit a certain key without actually having both hands on the keyboard).

Now, I’m sure most of us tend to have an averse reaction to the idea of using a different keyboard/-layout, because we’ve just gotten used to what we’ve always been doing. But the idea of the alphabetical keyboard sounds especially strange to me, as that’s where it all started… look here, the paragraph titled “History and Purpose” explains how the QWERTY layout was invented nearly 140 years ago to overcome the shortcomings of the alphabetical system. I believe that the Dvorak layout does a far better job at organizing the letters in a way that’s useful for (western) language typing, but at least QWERTY also had kind of a scientific idea behind it… the whole idea about New Standard Keyboards seems to be “let’s do something new (or at least something that hasn’t been around for a while), maybe we can sell it to some people who don’t know better.”