If Zero comes before One, why is it after 9?

[handy]

Yeah, what's up with this? Look at your computer keyboard, your phone, calculator, tv or vcr remote, the number one comes first but the number 0 is after the 9. Shouldn't the 0 come before the one? Obviously not, as they would have designed it that way, so what's happening?

[Alphagene]

Huge WAG here:

Generally, when we number ten things, we start with 1 and end with 10.

[pluto]

Look again. There are two basic patterns for 10-key devices: 1 at the top and 0 at the bottom (like your phone) and 9 at the top and 0 at the bottom (like a calculator).

On a rotary telephone dial the zero is adjacent to the 9 because a zero in a telephone number is signalled by 10 pulses on the line. When telephones acquired push buttons in a grid the ordering of the buttons was carried over from the old telephone dial.
From [i]The Last Word[/], from the publishers of New Scientist magazine.

That explains the telephone pad, and the other is, IMO, more logical so that's all right. (It is a carry over from the 10-key adding machine and the above article suggested it was because of the mechanical makeup of the machine.) But that top row on the keyboard is still a problem. If the "qwerty" keyboard was invented after the telephone dial maybe there was some carry over, but I think the typewriter came first.

Heck, two out of three ain't bad!

p.s. I have to confess I had a hard time typing "qwerty" because it's such an unusual word. About halfway through it hit me! Duh!


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"non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem"
-- William of Ockham

[StrTrkr777]

Well numerically 0 does indeed come before 1 since 0 is nothing and 1 is somewhat greater than nothing. From a positioning point of view. You cannot start a number with 0 on a calculator so you would not put it first, you cannot dial a 0 first, so it would not go first, and in typing it only goes after other numbers (in general) so you would not put it as the primary key.

Jeffery

[John W. Kennedy]

The one key, at least, was not always on keyboards (I don't think it was ever normally found on manual typewriters); you used lower-case "L" instead, and for the exclamation point, typed period-backspace-apostrophe. The zero may follow the nine because it would have looked silly next to the two.

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John W. Kennedy
"Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays."
-- Charles Williams