SteelbackDon wrote:
How phone keypads and computer keyboards the numbers are in a reverse order. I think it's to do with stopping automated phone-calling but don't understand how that stops it.
Nope, nothing to do with automated dialling.
Telephone keypad order is more to do with the letters on the keys and dates back to when the letters were on the outside of rotary dials which set the order of letters against 2-9, then 0.
The order of the numbers was set by how rotary dials work, 1 pulse for 1 through to 9 pulses for 9 and 10 for 0 (because you can’t detect zero pulses). All this also influenced how we ended up using 1xx for operator types of services, 999 and 0 for national (STD) calls.
Television remotes follow the same arrangement as telephones.
Numeric keypads for computers/calculators etc followed on from adding machines etc which are arranged in ascending order from the bottom as they were on the original mechanical adding machines.
The human brain simply copes well with the difference, but if you had an old Nokia mobile, which had a calculator app (for when you weren’t playing snake) it was confusing to use as it used the telephone keypad, so the numbers were in the telephone order, but our brains want it in the order we’re used to on a calculator.
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