Why that position of the keys?

The design of the old typewriters had a hardware problem that wasn't resolved in the better way. The problem was that when two keys was pressed quickly and that keys was close, they could get hooked between them and you had to release them with your hands, moving the seals that had engraved the letters. To solve it, they didn't thought any other better thing that do a distribution of the letters in a way that the keys pressed together more frequently (in english) was farest ones from the others. This way of put the keys was called QWERTY, because this letters are the first keys that appear on the keyboard.

Unfortunatelly, this solution have a terrible problem, because it increases the displacements of the fingers across the keyboard while we type, causing that we type more slowly.

Afterward, this design was ported to the keyboards only to avoid disorders to the people that knew use typewriters although it had not sense put the keys in this way.

With the idea of replace this distribution by an optimal one, the alternative Dvorak was created for each language, which use the optimal distribution of the keys to type in the fastest possible way in your language, because, unlike of the QWERTY keyboard, the letters that are pressed together more frecuently are more near between them. Unfortunately, this idea hadn't got a lot of success, due to that the QWERTY was very standarized and is very difficult find Dvorak keyboards. The people that use the two system usually says is that isn't a problem to change between each kind of keyboard, and that is as change of language.

Pity we can't go to the past and change the design of the typewriter by a Dvorak English keyboard. In this way the humanity would have saved an invaluable quantity of time typing in front of the computer.