Wow @depletedvespene, what an amazing source of information! Thank you!
You're welcome.
I'm trying to put together some preliminary information to reconstruct the reasons why some characters / symbols - in the various languages - have been chosen, and in what position.
From what I can understand - after starting to put the puzzle pieces together, starting from https://deskthority.net/viewtopic.php?t=14577 - the standardization of layouts is now governed by ISO / IEC 9995 (https://www.iso.org/committee/45382/x/catalogue/p/1/u/0/w/0/d/0), which should have had this evolution over time (if I have done the my "homework" correctly):
………
Am I on the right track?
Yes,
but...
Do remember that the ISO/IEC 9995 codified into a standard what was then the "common practice" in keyboard hardware and most of
that was standardized in the mid-80s by IBM, thanks to the sheer success of the Enhanced layout.
ISO9995 dictates a few things that national layouts must comply with, but doesn't define any particular national layout; most of those were codified and standardized by IBM itself — the "bigger ones" (Spanish, German, Italian, etc.) at some point during the XT keyboard period, slightly adjusted with the AT keyboard introduction and once more with the Enhanced layout, the "smaller ones" designed and implemented somewhat later on (Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, etc.), and the "special interest ones" being made by Microsoft well into the XXI century (Turkmen, Faroese, etc.).
TO BOOT, national layouts took heavily from preexisting standards for typewriters (codified or de facto), and even then there was competition. For example, TWO main layouts still exist for Spanish ("Spanish (Spain)" and "Spanish (Latin America)"), but in 1982, there were at least five different "Spanish" layouts
just within IBM itself (and
at least three more by other companies).
In most national layouts, some key assignments surely were inherited from typewriters, some surely were decided with a lot of thought and documentation, some surely were decided on a whim (braces and brackets flipped on the Spanish (Latin America) layout), some with neither (about a third of the modern Canadian layout), some are undoubtledly mistakes that no one cared to correct later on (flipping the | and ¦ characters in the English (UK) layout), and while some were designed with utter dedication by competent people, restricted on what they could do by the hardware and the software of the time, some were created by clueless dimwits that were not really under any significant restrictions (the Azeri (Standard) layout being the most prominent example of this).
I am afraid that for many "odd" or "weird" assignments, specially on the older layouts, we'll never truly know the reason.
