Learning to Type
In addition to learning how to program in my teens, one of the best things I did was take a typing class in high school. By this point I already knew that I wanted to do something with computers and that meant I’d be typing a lot.
Like others without training
, I was mostly using the hunt-and-peck method of typing, always having to look at the keys. This is slow and inefficient. So even though the high school guidance councilor didn’t think it made any sense for me to take a touch typing class, I signed up for one anyway.
The class was filled with electric typewriters. I don’t know what model or anything, but you didn’t have to press the keys hard and they were loud. Being typewriters, what you typed appeared on paper (!) and you have to manually move the paper carriage from the right edge back to the left when you reached the end of the line, which also fed the paper up one line.
If you’ve not thought about it before, you now know how the CR (carriage return) and LF (line feed) ASCII values got their names.
I found that I learned to type pretty quickly, probably because I already was familiar with where most keys were on the keyboard, even if the Atari keys were not always in the same position as a typewriter
.
I remember one day in class, the teacher was having us type longer paragraphs of text and I finished typing them all rather quickly, certainly well before anyone else. He seemed insulted and called on me when I stopped typing. He asked me to pull out the paper and count the typing errors I made. As I was doing this, he starts telling the class, “See, students, it doesn’t matter how fast you type if you make lots of mistakes.”, assuming that is what I did. When I finished counting, I told him I didn’t see any mistakes, which he had to come over to verify. He didn’t call on me after that.
These days I don’t type super-fast, but I still type pretty quickly, about 80 to 90 words per minute. Now who is up for a game of Typo Attack?
It surprises me to this day how many professional software engineers and developers I run across that do not know how to touch type.
I still get messed up today with the Atari having its double-quote on Shift-2. Other keys on the wrong positions are & on Shift-6, single quote on Shift-7, @ on Shift-8 and -, =, +, * to the right of the letter keys.
Great work! Love the posts from Goto 10. I also took a typewriter class when I was in high school in the late 70s. I did horrible on my typing speed but eventually learned to type fast on the Atari 800XL by playing around with it so much and writing BASIC programs or typing them in from magazines. Was a great time to be a young person when the computer industry was emerging. I own two Ataris that are fully working today, an 800XL and an original 800.
I learned to type on and used an Atari 400 for years, which wrecked any future hopes of typing like a normal human. My speed is about the same as yours, but performed as a clawed chaotic mess of fingers instead of with the elegance of touch typing.