In a middle school computer lab filled with Apple 2e, I attached a little script to one of the copies of Odel Lake available for the students to play... it over rode the screen with scrolling code that would loop on random line. The school effing panicked like the computer had asked if someone wanted to play a nice game of chess.

Now fixed, thanks for watching!

There’s so much wrong there I don’t know where to start. The QWERTY layout comes from mechanical typewriters that used long hammer like leavers with the type on them. If you went too fast the leavers would jam. The layout was intentionally designed to slow the typist down. Incidentally it also allowed salespeople to spell out “typewriter” entirely on the top row. Once powered electric typewriters were available it was possible for the machine to go fast enough and better more logical/ergonomic layouts could be created, and thus we got the Dvorak layout and others that are better than QWERTY in every measurable way. Unfortunately the cost of retooling all the existing systems and training materials and retraining workers was wrongly considered prohibitively expensive and the world never switched away from the terrible QWERTY keyboard. Another sad example of “good enough” beating out “better” because it was thought cheaper. A number of Dvorak layouts are still around. They are still used, but mostly by people that keyboard for a living and need to reduce RSI. Dvorak even created some specific to one handed typing, frequently used by disabled folk. You can easily remap your computer keyboard to them if you want. My wife switch to Dvorak decades ago for his reason as she does a lot of writing g n her work. Incidentally, all the typing speed records for decades were set using that layout, which has always been about being better for humans, not for the machine as you stated. ASCII has zero to do with the keyboard layout, and is basically encoded into binary in numerical/alphabetic order. The thing that confuses people is that it starts with non-printable characters. I learned to decode it in order to steal passwords by turning on the tape punch on the teletype after I logged off. The encoding makes ‘sense’ in binary, not in decimal. But again, zero relationship between ascii encoding and the typewriter keyboard layout. The concept of AI is far older than the 60’s, far older than the term even. Asimov created his famous 3 laws of robotics in the early 40’s when computers were still in their infancy and used vacuum tube ‘valves’ for logic gates. I Robot and his other shorts on that subject are still worth reading today. I don’t have to imagine life without computers, I didn’t own a computer until my 20’s (C64), practical laptops weren’t a thing for nearly another 20 years. People showed up at meetings with note pads and pens/pencils.. bringing laptops to meetings didn’t become the norm until after the turn of the millennium. Half the people currently in the workforce lived through what is boggling your mind to imagine. Maybe ask them about it?