The QWERTY layout wasn’t invented by one person or another, but by many people working together. Incidentally, Sholes himself found the key layout unsatisfactory and continued to work on improvements for the rest of his life. A few months before his death, he sought a patent for a new keyboard where the top row of letter keys began X P M C H.

But it was QWERTY that hung around, in part because the Remington 2 typewriter became very popular, and in part because it’s a good keyboard layout. There have been many attempts to improve upon QWERTY in the years since its introduction, but none made a big enough difference to shift the standard. The best-known purportedly easier typing layout is the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, created in 1932 by August Dvorak, which features A O E U on the left-side home keys. Some studies found that Dvorak’s layout improved typing speed and lowered error rates, but many of those studies were paid for by Dvorak, and more recent scholarship has shown little if any benefit to the Dvorak, or any other purportedly optimized keyboard layout.

The QWERTY keyboard—partly by accident—is pretty good at alternating hands within words, which means that one hand can be reaching for a key while the other hand is typing. It’s not perfectly efficient—the most common keys are typed by the left hand, whereas most people type slightly faster and more accurately with their right hands—but for most of us, most of the time, QWERTY works.

It has certainly worked for me. In elementary school, I had terrible handwriting (hence it taking an entire line of notebook paper to write the word interesting in cursive). No matter how hard I tried to hold the pencil steady, I just couldn’t write well. But even as a kid, I was a hell of a typist. Typing on a QWERTY keyboard was one of the first things I ever became good at, initially because I wanted to play the text-based video games of the 1980s, but eventually because I liked the feeling of excellence. By sixth grade I could type eighty words a minute. These days, I can type as fast as I can think. Or maybe, since I’ve spent so much of my life thinking through typing, my brain has learned to think at the speed of my typing, just as my brain has learned to think of the alphabet as beginning Q-W-E-R-T-Y.

The keyboard is my path to having thoughts, and also my path to sharing them. I can’t play an instrument, but I can bang on this literary piano, and when it’s going well, a certain percussive rhythm develops. Sometimes—not every day, certainly, but sometimes—knowing where the letters are allows me to feel like I know where the words are. I love the sound of pressing keys on a great keyboard—the technical term is “key action”—but what I love most about typing is that on the screen or on the page, my writing is visually indistinguishable from anyone else’s.