Qwerty, Azerty, Qwertz

What is the title of this post? Is it a short story by Jose Luis Borges? Well, as you may have worked out, it’s about computer keyboards. qwerty is not a word but the first 6 characters on an English keyboard. Keyboards for different languages have a different set of 6 characters first.

When I first started to use a computer and was learning to type, I was working in an office that used Apple Macs with a random mix of keyboards: some English (qwerty), some French (azerty) and some Swiss German (qwertz). I had to use whatever was available each day—I suppose today we might call that something like hotmacking or hotboarding. That ordeal experience must have slowed down my learning to type, but made me good at switching from one to the other automatically.

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