Tap is a one-handed gadget that fits over your fingers like rubbery brass knuckles and connects wirelessly to your smartphone. Seems like a great idea, right? But when I tried it, the reality of using Tap was neither fun nor funny.

New Keyboards
The contenders
What came first: the typist or the keyboard? The answer depends on the keyboard. It turns out that there is a lot of myth and misinformation surrounding the development of QWERTY, but these various theories all seem to agree that the QWERTY layout was developed along with, and inextricably linked to, early typewriters. In the s, a politician, printer, newspaper man, and amateur inventor in Milwaukee by the name of Christopher Latham Sholes spent his free time developing various machines to make his businesses more efficient. One such invention was an early typewriter, which he developed with Samuel W. The earliest typewriter keyboard resembled a piano and was built with an alphabetical arrangement of 28 keys. The team surely assumed it would be the most efficient arrangement.
Arrangement of Characters
Remington and Sons in It became popular with the success of the Remington No. In October , Sholes filed a patent application for his early writing machine he developed with the assistance of his friends Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. The first model constructed by Sholes used a piano-like keyboard with two rows of characters arranged alphabetically as shown below: [1]. The construction of the "Type Writer" had two flaws that made the product susceptible to jams. Firstly, characters were mounted on metal arms or type bars , which would clash and jam if neighbouring arms were pressed at the same time or in rapid succession. Secondly, its printing point was located beneath the paper carriage, invisible to the operator, a so-called "up-stroke" design. Consequently, jams were especially serious, because the typist could only discover the mishap by raising the carriage to inspect what had been typed.
The first time I heard the lie, I was in fifth grade. Ward took me aside or maybe he told the whole class, it was a long time ago to tell me about the wonders of Dvorak, a different keyboard layout that was scientifically designed to be more efficient than the standard layout. You see, in the olden days, mechanical typewriters could jam if people hit the keys too quickly, so they had to put the common letters far apart from each other. The modern keyboard, I was told, was a holdover of the mechanical age.