Path: utzoo!censor!comspec!humvax!becker!hybrid!scifi!bywater!uunet!odi!ed
From: ed@odi.com (Ed Schwalenberg)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware
Subject: Re: Keyboard mystery...
Message-ID: <1991Jan9.145619.12728@odi.com>
Date: 9 Jan 91 14:56:19 GMT
References: <1991Jan2.124323.1824@vax5.cit.cornell.edu> <_NL+N+*@irie.ais.org>
Distribution: comp
Organization: Object Design, Inc.
Lines: 32
In-Reply-To: danr@ais.org's message of 8 Jan 91 13:34:17 GMT

In article <_NL+N+*@irie.ais.org> danr@ais.org (Daniel Romanchik) writes:

  In article <1991Jan2.124323.1824@vax5.cit.cornell.edu> rev@vax5.cit.cornell.edu writes:
  >The PC's numeric keypad looks like this:
  >        7 8 9
  >        4 5 6
  >        1 2 3
  >        0
  >On the other hand the phone looks like this:
  >        1 2 3
  >        4 5 6
  >        7 8 9
  >          0
  >Any idea why the difference:

  What the other respondents say is true.  The computer keyboard is 
  patterned on the adding machine keyboard.  The reason the phone pad
  is different is that ATT didn't want adding machine wizards to be
  able to dial a phone number as quickly as they could input numbers
  to an adding machine.  Early TouchTone circuits could not recognize the
  tones as quickly as they do now.

Superstition.  AT&T has been practicing human-interface engineering with
a vengeance for longer than most of us have been alive.  In this case,
they decided that for the great majority of people who use phones but not
adding machines, the 123 on top was more logical and easy to use.  It's
also more logical and easy to use for adding machines, but like QWERTY
keyboards it's too hard to change over when the entire "installed base"
is used to the current standard.

There was a paper published by Bell Labs on this; I'm amazed nobody has
posted the reference.