First Keyboard(s)
The first few keyboards were never successful. Nothing to see here.
The Sholes Keyboard aka Qwerty Keyboard
Invented by Christopher Latham Sholes around the 1870s, after his unsuccessful first typewriter. The layout was to address a certain mechanical jamming when adjacent keys were pressed together quickly in succession by separating common combinations of letters. This layout eventually became the standard. As the saying goes, first come, first served.
Dvorak Keyboard
Conceived by August Dvorak around 1936, this layout claims to have been optimized based on letter frequency and the human anatomy. It has been reported to boost typing speed by 70%. Unfortunately, QWERTY has taken root as the standard, thus there are only very few takers of this layout.
The evolution of the physical keyboards ends around here. Minor variations like wireless keyboards and various ergonomic keyboards have been developed, but no a game changer has arrived to the physical realm yet.
Virtual Keyboards
Touch Screen Keyboards
The first touch screen keyboard probably arrived shortly after touch screen technology was developed, but it was popularized by the revolutionary iPhone (circa 2007). Clearly the tight space available would mean keys must be small and tightly packed, resulting in many mistypes (see Fitt’s Law). Auto-correct to the rescue.
Projected Keyboards
Another kind of virtual keyboard projects itself onto any surface to type on. This has not really caught on though. Probably less effective in bright settings.
Dynamic Keyboard (razor switchblade)
This gaming device has a unique keyboard whose keys changes depending on the current state of whatever is running on it. Image of the keys are able to change dynamically (time multiplexing). This may save space, but at the cost of consistency.
Swype
An innovative way of typing for on-screen keyboards, this approach actually reduces mistypes (see Fitt’s Law again) and claims to be faster (up to debate). The user simply has to trace out all the letters of the word in a continuous fashion to get the right input. See video.
Alas, will the day finally come when we completely do away with keyboards?
CS3240 Group 07 
wow ..a dynamic keyboard!! Do you know if there are any success stories of it? or has it been experimented with non-gaming applications?
Hi, Ms Bimlesh. Currently it is still a concept and we believe that it has to have full self-customizable keys to suit the user’s needs. If each program has a different set of keys, it might be confusing or hard to grasp for the user. For example, a game may have its direction keys at the left while another game may have them at the right. If the dynamic keyboard is fully customizable, the user can achieve consistency.
For non-gaming applications, we believe that the dynamic keyboard may be used in situations like translating or typing different languages. For example, English form may show the alphabets in QWERTY or AZERTY format, Japanese form may show Hiragana or Katakana and Chinese form may show the strokes of the word. The user can switch the form of keyboard quickly by pressing a command. In this way, the user can have an overview of all the required languages rather than relying on only a fixed keyboard for work.
Very interesting post. I brought up this post during the tutorial and discussed why QWERTY is preferred over other keyboards.
It will be good if you can give some explanations on how QWERTY becomes the dominant keyboard.