I learned to type on an old Macintosh, using one of those programs that commands you to type increasingly complex sentences at higher and higher speeds. An animated lobster followed my cursor, and if it caught up as I misspelled words or slapped my fingers into the wrong keys, the cursed crustacean would erase the whole paragraph and force me to start over again.

During this, I asked the same question asked by most new typists: why does it say QWERTY at the top of my keyboard?

The short answer is a phenomenon called technological lock-in. When the typewriter was first invented, by newspaper editor Christopher Sholes in the 1860s, the typebars that held letters next to one another could clash if the machine was typed too quickly. To reduce jams, Sholes put letters often used together farther apart, hence the reason the vowels are scattered across the keyboard.

For the early, crude typewriters, this was a purely practical development. But for modern computer keyboards, or even for the electric typewriters that preceded them, it was meaningless.

The reason QWERTY has retained its dominance is that no one has the energy to teach generations of typists to use a different layout. Imagine the chaos if there were two or three competing keyboard layouts on the market, or if Macs and PCs used different letter layouts. (Now, that would cause some Mac vs. PC animosity.) QWERTY is here to stay.

This kind of lock-in affects almost every aspect of our lives, from the largest level to the smallest trivialities, yet we almost never notice. In many case, it's simply that the first product to market forces everyone else to follow along.

At the small end of the scale, look at how words get locked-in. Kleenex is a brand name, but it's synonymous with facial tissue. It's the same with Band-Aid, or Hoover across the pond to refer to a vacuum cleaner.

A bit higher up the scale, look at the early 1980s fight for dominance between VHS and Beta. The Betamax player has been the subject of so many jokes that many people assume it was a piece of junk. In fact, Beta was better. It gave better picture quality than VHS. But it was also more expensive. It turned out that people didn't really care if VHS was a little fuzzier, they liked having the extra cash. Beta died.

On the macro level, consider the side of the road on which you drive. Every country on the planet has picked one or the other, with the origins sometimes obscure. Everything from papal decrees to the shape of carts are given as reasons.

But when automobiles came along, it became essential to codify it. Nations exporting cars tended to force it on their dependencies: England made sure India drove on the left, while Germany forced right-side driving on its Eastern European conquests in the late 1930s.

Whether the reasons are economic, practical, political, or cultural quirks, once a technology or system is locked-in, the costs of changing are usually too high to consider.

Understanding lock-in gives us another way to view the world. It may not make it any less frustrating for me to find the X key when I'm typing, but at least I know why it's there.

From nuclear power to the red-yellow-green traffic lights, from reading left-to-right to looking at maps with north at the top, a lot of our lives are governed by rules that were locked in generations ago. They may not matter any more, but we still live with the consequences every day.

Visit Matthew Claxton's blog, Evolving Langley, at http://tiny.cc/A0D3W at www.langleyadvance.com