Some­thing I’ve never thought of read­ing before: the his­tory of the QWERTY key­board:

With the assis­tance of […] Car­los Glid­den and Samuel W. Soule, [Christo­pher Sholes] built an early writ­ing machine for which a patent appli­ca­tion was filed in Octo­ber 1867. How­ever, Sholes’ “Type Writer” had many defects, [includ­ing] the ten­dency of the type­bars to clash and jam if struck in rapid succession.

Sholes strug­gled for the next six years to per­fect his inven­tion, mak­ing many trial-and-error rearrange­ments of the orig­i­nal machine’s alpha­bet­i­cal key arrange­ment in an effort to reduce the fre­quency of type­bar clashes. Even­tu­ally he arrived at a four-row, upper case key­board approach­ing the mod­ern QWERTY standard.

As Don­ald Nor­man says in The Psychology/Design of Every­day Things, “We are com­mit­ted to it, even though it was designed to sat­isfy con­straints that no longer apply, was based on a style of typ­ing no longer used, and is dif­fi­cult to learn.”

It made me think: what other ‘every­day things’ are com­mit­ted to past con­straints, and in my work do I design to any?