Since those early days of the computer revolution, in university classrooms and California garages, the look of our machines has been changing endlessly. Except for the keyboard. You could sit down at just about any computer built in the past 40 years and immediately know how to enter text. That keyboard—nicknamed QWERTY for its first six keys—is the unkillable cockroach of the tech industry.

It’s not that QWERTY is perfect—in fact, one popular (but probably apocryphal) story says it was designed specifically to slow typists...