I’m slightly suspicious of this story that Unix commands were made so short (cp instead of copy, mv instead of move, ls instead of list, and so on) because the console keyboard had really unpleasant keys.

I imagine it must be a confluence of many things, not just this one. Shorter means faster even with amazing keyboards. Shorter also means the commands travel quicker over the slow modems of the era. The downsides were limited: the early nerdy user base of Unix could handle the extra confusion.

On the other hand – no pun intended – I typed on the keyboard on the picture and I can confirm it is absolutely, positively atrocious, with the tallest keys you have possibly seen:

At any rate, it’s a good a reminder of the power of motor memory, and the difficulty of change management. Even the worst keyboards imaginable are so much better now, and the modems so much faster. And yet, the short and confusing commands remain to this day.