[geeks] geeks Digest, Vol 53, Issue 18

[Mike Murphy]

Bill Bradford wrote:
========
Junior High:  I took "Typing", on actual typewriters (and I preferred the
Selectric to the whiz-bang fancy new ones most of the class used).  By the
time I was in 9th grade, they had started turning it into "keyboarding".

High school (Anadarko, '91-93): "Typing II" on actual typewriters, and
the school offered Pascal and C classes for honors/advanced students.
The computer courses also included a LOT of WordPerfect 5.1 (on PS/2 model
25s).

College (USAO @ Chickasha, '93-96): The only place I ever saw an actual
typewriter was in the business offices occasionally, or on a professor's
desk.  The "Business" computer-related classes were all Lotus/WP/DBase,
but the CompSCI classes went all the way up to Pascal, C, COBOL, compiler
design, database design, algorithms, etc.

Funny fact:  I did about 30wpm after my first year of "Typing" class.
Now, I have at least one person a week walk past my office at work, stop,
look in, and make a comment to the effect of "YOU TYPE FASTER THAN ANYONE
I'VE EVER SEEN".  Apparently it's been a topic of discussion among people
on my floor.  Probably doesn't help that both systems on my desk have
either a Model M or a Unicomp current-production-equivalent attached.

I only do about 80wpm on average.. when I really try I can hit 100-110, but
my error rate goes up.
===========

And I reply:

It's not your typing skill, it's the model M ;-) I have a model M (1391472)
hooked up to the Dell laptop docking station with 500MHz laptop that I
now use as a desktop, and I do 80-100wpm. It's the keyboard, clearly.

My father forced me to learn to type. He bought a Smith-Corona manual
portable from my grandmother and equipped it with blank keycaps, handed
me a typing lesson book and said, "Learn." No wasting a period on a typing
class even though the cute girls took typing. Oh, well.

BTW, the 1391472 is the small model with no numeric pad. IBM used to make
really
good keyboards (typewriters, too.) When you pressed a key on an IBM 1620
console,
you really felt that the computer was paying attention.

--Mike