Why aren't the keys on a computer keyboard arranged in alphabetical order? The original "keyboard" was on a mechanical typewriter which had metal arms that printed ink on the paper as you typed. These metal arms could jam and bang into each other if you pressed too fast when you were typing, and this could happen a lot if you pressed commonly used letter combinations. So to prevent too many crashes of the metal arms, the QWERTY layout (see the top 6 letters from left to right on your keyboard) was created to separate out commonly used letter combinations. Many people from previous generations learned to type on these typewriters and so when computers were invented, they kept the same layout for people to be able to change over easily.