QWERTY's initial design was for typewriters. To prevent jamming of typebars, commonly used letter pairs were not placed together.
Saying that it was designed to be inefficient is wrong, however it's fair to say that preventing typewriter jams overrode typing efficiency as a design consideration.
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QWERTY was intentionally designed to be inefficient? I thought it was based on statistics of common letters or something. Care to shed some light?
QWERTY's initial design was for typewriters. To prevent jamming of typebars, commonly used letter pairs were not placed together.
Saying that it was designed to be inefficient is wrong, however it's fair to say that preventing typewriter jams overrode typing efficiency as a design consideration.
Rather, it sped up typing by preventing jams.