History of the Keyboard

If keyboards didn’t exist, the pace and nature of modern society would be dramatically different.

A World Without Keyboards

Without keyboards, we’d still be writing everything by hand — letters, reports, novels, legal documents, scientific papers, school assignments, emails, even code.

Life would be slower, more manual, and more error-prone. Offices would resemble 19th-century scriptoria, filled with clerks transcribing everything by pen. Bureaucracy would swell with delays. Communication, creativity, and computation would be drastically limited.

Even voice-to-text tools wouldn’t have emerged as they rely on our ability to correct, format, and manipulate text — functions we perform with a keyboard.

Programming languages? Near impossible to write or debug efficiently.

Internet search? Awkward at best.

Social media? Likely stillborn.

The absence of keyboards would mean a bottleneck in progress. We’d have very few books, few ideas shared quickly, less global collaboration, and much less innovation.

The Impact of the Typewriter Keyboard

The typewriter, first appearing commercially in the 1870s, revolutionized writing:

- Speed and Legibility: It allowed people to produce clean, consistent, readable documents far faster than handwriting.

- Employment Opportunities: It created whole new professions—typists, secretaries, clerical workers—many of which offered new roles for women in the workforce.

- Standardization: The QWERTY layout became a universal writing system, teaching generations a consistent way to input text. And it was the logical outcome of the keyboard.

- Business Transformation: It streamlined correspondence, invoicing, and record-keeping, accelerating commerce and communication.

Literary Production: Authors could write faster and edit more easily. Whole genres of journalism and fiction flourished.

The Rise of the Computer Keyboard

The computer keyboard, an evolution of the typewriter, multiplied these gains exponentially:

Digital Efficiency: With computers, keyboards enabled lightning-fast input, editing, storage, and retrieval of text — from business memos to software code.

Programming: Keyboards are essential for software development, powering the digital tools and platforms we now depend on.

Internet and Communication: Email, chat, blogging, social media, and search engines all rely on typed input. Without keyboards, the modern web as we know it wouldn’t function.

Productivity Software: Word processors, spreadsheets, coding environments, and databases—all require keyboard interaction, revolutionizing the way we work and think.

Democratized Creation: From novels to indie video games, keyboards gave everyone the tools to create and share, instantly and globally.

A Quiet Giant of Progress

We often overlook the keyboard, but it’s arguably one of the most important inventions of the last 150 years. It didn’t just replace the pen—it amplified human thought, sped up civilization, and laid the foundation for the Information Age.

Without it, we’d be stuck in a world where ideas moved at the speed of ink drying. With it, we’ve built a world that runs on words typed faster than we can think.

Why are number pads laid out differently on phones and keyboards?

If you’ve ever looked closely at the number pad on your mobile phone and compared it to the numeric keypad on a computer keyboard or calculator, you may have noticed something odd: the order of the numbers is reversed.

On a phone keypad (including mobile phones), the layout looks like this:

But on a standard computer keyboard’s number pad—or on most calculators—you’ll find this arrangement:

Why the difference? The answer lies in their distinct histories.

Computer keyboards use the layout created in, ooh, 1965

And it simply inherited the layout used by old-style comptometers and calculators.

In 1964 Sperry launched the Univac Uniscope. Neither a vacuum cleaner nor a telescope, this was the first electronic machine to sport a number pad.

Univac Uniscope. The first electronic machine with a number pad.

It wasn’t a computer as we know it – but rather a machine that let you send instructions to a distant computer. After a while – could be minutes or hours, the computer would send you back the information by printing it out on computer paper.

The Univac was a breakthrough because it had a screen – a cathode ray tube, like a television set of its time with a bulbous rear end. Imagine if you sat a your desk with a keybosard – but you couldnt see what you were typing – that was what computer was like in 1963, prior to the Univac..

The following year, 1965, came the first computer keyboard.

One of the earliest dedicated computer keyboards was introduced in the Datapoint 3300 in 1969.

Unlike previous devices, which repurposed typewriters and teletype machines, the Datapoint 3300 had a layout specifically designed for computer use. This machine set the stage for future keyboards, leading to the development of the terminal keyboard as a standard interface for computers.

The numeric keypad on a computer keyboard is based on earlier adding machines and mechanical calculators, which long predated digital phones.

These devices were used by professionals—bookkeepers, accountants, and data-entry workers. And the machines all used the same layout, with 7-8-9 at the top.

And the computer keyboard simply inherited this convention.

But why did comptometers use the 7-8-9 layout?

When Bell Labs began exploring keypad layouts in the late 1950s, they contacted all of the leading calculator manufacturers to find out why they had chosen to put low numbers at the bottom and high numbers at the top rather than the other way around.

No one had an answer. That decision seems to have been arbitrary: no one had done any research about which layout was most convenient for users.

So many myths

But myths abound to explain why the old comptometers used the 7-8-9 layout.

Some people think because comptometers were used by finance people, the companies designed their machines for quickly adding up, with common numbers at the bottom, and in easier reach. But there’s no evidence for that.

Why do mobile phones have 1-2-3 on their top line?

Answer: mobile phones developed from ‘touch tone’ phones, which used the 1-2-3 layout.

And if you want to ask, ‘Why did touch tone phon es use that 1-2-3 layout, we’ll have to go back to

The layout of telephone keypads was developed in the 1960s by Bell Labs, part of AT&T.

Engineers conducted extensive user testing to determine the optimal configuration for the push-button telephone, which was replacing the rotary dial.

Layout options for the Bell Labs phone research

They found that people were most comfortable – and productive – with numbers beginning at the top left and descending downward, in rows of three.

That might not seem surprising to any of us today. After all, we read from one to ten (not ten to one). And we read from top left to bottom right.

This layout—starting with 1-2-3—was unfamiliar at the time. But it came out top among the general public who were tested for speed and accuracy when using different phone layouts.

Bel carried out user testing

Bell Labs didn’t just invent the layout—they tested multiple alternatives. Layouts such as circular, diagonal, and even calculator-style configurations were all trialed with ordinary people. The now-standard telephone layout performed best in terms of speed, accuracy, and user satisfaction—especially among those unfamiliar with adding machines.

And when the first computer keyboard arrived,

4. Standardization and Inertia

Once both layouts became widely adopted in their respective domains, they were difficult to change. Telephones and calculators became embedded in daily life, and people learned to use both. Since the devices served very different purposes, no pressure emerged to unify the layouts.

5. Technological Independence

The mobile phone and computer keyboard evolved independently for decades. Only in recent years—particularly with smartphones and on-screen keyboards—have we started using both on the same device. But even now, they retain their traditional layouts to preserve user familiarity and minimize confusion.

Conclusion

The reversed layouts of phone and computer number pads are not a design mistake—they are deliberate outcomes shaped by history, testing, and human behavior. Each design serves a different purpose, tailored to its primary users and use cases. While it might seem inconsistent at first glance, this difference is a perfect example of how technology evolves in parallel to meet distinct needs.