We’ve been watching the celebrity boxing match between BlackBerry and Typo, and we are waiting to see what Ryan Seacrest plans to do after the first round of gavel was delivered. Like all of those involved in the fight, we know what it feels like to have people question our innovation and publicly debate infringement and patent protection.I think we all have our own view on whether that iPhone attachment is really a copycat or merely a snap-on, so for the sake of argument, we want to know:What is the standard for today’s keyboard innovators in building the next best thing? After all, the predecessor to today’s Smith Corona was one of the five leading typewriter companies that made QWERTY the order of the day.Through the years, we discovered that QWERTY became one of those precious few words that allows Q and U to have some time apart, and maybe one of the words most associated with our modern technological age.  Look down at nearly any keyboard and there it stands, QWERTY, a word apparently more complicated than many have thought, if they have thought about it at all.QWERTY stands as a simple tale of good old American ingenuity. Some orientations of letters on these early machines juxtaposed commonly paired letters, resulting in jamming, an obvious problem for any typist of the age. With jamming, of course, came Milwaukee amateur inventor Christopher Latham, who helped create a new orientation (QWERTY). This would reduce such occurrences by spreading certain letters apart, thus slowing down efficiency, but increasing flow. Sholes’ name may not be familiar to most people, but the general story of QWERTY’s designed inefficiency stands as one of those cultural tidbits that no one is quite sure where they heard it from, but most assume it simply must be true.Why else would these modern keyboards look so strange?According to a recent paper by Kyoto University researchers Koichi Yasuoka and Motoko Yasuoka, QWERTY came to be, mainly by accident. Earlier designs had various numbers of rows, orientation of letters, and were changed and improved over time. Additionally, early customers of the typewriter were not the typists of the common myth of QWERTY who needed to be slowed down in order to prevent jams, but rather Morse code receivers. If the intent was to allow for messages to be sent and received at the same speed, logic dictates that forcing the receiver to slow down would cause a disconnect, and thus potentially compromise the message itself.The question then still remains, why did QWERTY, out of numerous potential candidates, become the standard that comes down to the present day?  The answer is that the Union Typewriter Company said so. The Union Typewriter Company, consisting of the five leading typewriter companies of the era — Remington, Caligraph, Yost, Densmore, and Smith-Premier — adopted QWERTY as the standard orientation of their machines. Thus, a de facto standard for the industry, and eventually all keyboard-based devices, was born. But what does this all mean?We have now apparently gone from an at least sensible story about a practical problem solved through an impractical keyboard configuration to a story that finds the origins of one of the most commonly seen, if not thought about words, QWERTY, as a somewhat random design made standard through happenstance and corporate solidification.  Does such new knowledge mandate movement to the streets and into corporate board rooms demanding a superior QWERTY alternative?Perhaps. Perhaps not.Ultimately, the takeaway from either origin story shows that QWERTY, with all its modern-day detractors and potential alternatives, has somewhat unexpectedly found its way below the fingertips of billions of people around the world.  Surprisingly this configuration has lasted for more than a century, and we’ll have to see if it survives into the next one.Unless Typo or Blackberry wants to challenge it, we’ll see who wins the next round.