Question: Why is a keyboard 'QWERTY' not 'ABCDEF'?

Sam Geen answered on 24 Jun 2013:

Back when typewriters were used, the keys used to stick if you pressed too many close to each other at a time. So someone came up with a keyboard that tried to spread out the letters so that you didn’t press too many adjacent keys while typing an average sentence. There are different layouts that you can use – the Dvorak layout, for example, but these aren’t used very often. It’s a case where once enough people learn to touch-type on a certain keyboard, they don’t want to relearn for a new one.

In France, they use AZERTY keyboards, which was very confusing at first (especially as you need to press shift to use the number keys, and they have all the accents on there, too).