American (and English Canadian) typewriters use that layout.  For a while,
well into the 1970s, there were two common American layouts for computer
terminal keyboards, one that closely followed the typewriter layout and one
that shifted around the non-alphabetic characters to simplify the circuitry
needed to implement the Shift key.  By the time microcomputers began to hit
the mass market, the typewriter layout had pretty much won.
  But that only covers the US and much of Canada.  The same bit pattern that
displays as {hash mark, number sign, pound sign, octothorpe, etc} in the US
will, on a UK machine, display the *currency* "pound sign".  Not too
surprisingly, the various languages that use characters with accents,
umlauts, and diacritical marks require keyboards that allow these characters
to be typed relatively painlessly -- some add keys, some reassign some keys,
some swap "Y" and "Z" from the positions Americans expect to see them.

  The IBM mainframe EBCDIC character set included a block of 12 character
bit patterns that could be associated with different symbols in different
countries.  (In many countries, these included the "<" and ">" symbols, but
not always with the same bit values....)  This system broke when people
started connecting systems in different countries together into global
networks.

David Gillett


On 16 Oct 2003 at 6:14, joseph marty wrote:

> I took a typing class in preparation for college back in the summer of 1962, and the @ sign was a shift 2.  I have never seen a typewriter in the U.S. that wasn't like that.  At this point I wouldn't know what to do if they changed it.
>
> >Thanks for the help - I had not dug deep enough into the XP Control
> >Panel/Regional and Language Options to get at the keyboards
> >options. Michele Sayer pointed me in the right direction.
> >
> >Joe Lore from the US said it was standard there to have to do a Shift
> >2 to get the @ sign, is this really so? Might be worth Joe having a
> >poke about the extra parameters that Michele pointed out and see if
> >there is something he could try.
> >
> >
>
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