The Keypad Mystery

The other day I was at work trying to enter calculations on my little numeric keypad.  Most of the time I can do it without looking.  On this day, however, I also had to call someone on the phone.  Multitasking and I do not go well together.

The the numeric keypad on a phone looks like this:

Obviously, you can look at your computer or calculator and see that the numeric keypad looks something like this:

Why do they do this to people?  It seems logical that the ordering would be the same.

I did a bit of research and found one of the most poorly written articles on Wikipedia I have ever found.

But, it basically says that security keypads have been around longer and they always had the 4 rows of 3 starting with the number 1 so that’s what was adopted by the telephone manufacturers.  That still doesn’t explain why calculators weren’t done in a similar fashion.

I found a site dedicated to this conundrum.  Go there if you must.  Just click on their picture below…