The QWERTY Days Are Almost Over

The next era of tech won’t work with a physical keyboard—you’ll interact with it the same way you do other people

QWERTY keyboards have been around for over a century, but a new era in tech needs a new kind of input. WSJ’s David Pierce tries out the keyboards of the future. Photo/Video: James Pace-Cornsilk for The Wall Street Journal
By

Since those early days of the computer revolution, in university classrooms and California garages, the look of our machines has been changing endlessly. Except for the keyboard. You could sit down at just about any computer built in the past 40 years and immediately know how to enter text. That keyboard—nicknamed QWERTY for its first six keys—is the unkillable cockroach of the tech industry.

It’s not that QWERTY is perfect—in fact, one popular (but probably apocryphal) story says it was designed specifically to slow typists...