I signed up for a typing class on my own in high school, because by then I was spending as much time as possible in the school's lab of Commodore PETs.

The typing class was on IBM Selectric typewriters, which pretty much spoiled me for every single keyboard I've used since then.

I took typing in High School. My speed is way down now, but I did pretty well at it back in the day. Unfortunately, these days I have a tendency to transpose when typing. I usually catch myself when I do, but that doesn't really help on a typewriter, even a correcting one (since the correction usually looks like crap).

I liked typing class. It was me and one other guy and 18 girls. Plus we had brand new IBM Selectric typewriters. And it was just something physical that you did for an hour. The more you practiced the better you got. It was good for my GPA. Low stress, high utility, lots of girls.

But then I went and took shorthand which was not nearly so useful, and quite a bit more difficult.

Somebody could make good money if they could invent a computer keyboard which had the crisp action of the IBM Selectric keyboard.

My typing class let us turn in extra credit by doing typing exercises on our home typewriters. I would type for an hour or so after school and turn in pages and pages, and got 110% each quarter due to all of it.

Heh. I'm reading a review of S2 of Being Human in the Guardian and apparently there's a little Buffy shout out.

I also learned to type back in '79 on a manual typewriter. I think I got up to 45 wpm. Now I can type faster, but my error rate has all gone to heck (thanks to computers).

My accuracy is kind of for crap, so typewriters (and temp agency typing tests) are still my nemeses. Hooray for auto-correct.

I used to continually try and learn shorthand--and fail miserably.

I'm not sure when I got to the point of being able to type usefully without looking at the keyboard--probably university. It wasn't that required for the programming I'd done up to then, because it was so damned slow. Even now I usually do still look at the screen--I'm not good enough to be able to spend all my time looking at the source of what I might be transcribing.

Problem with touch-typing is when people think they're upgrading keyboards. Half-size backspace key on this one, plus the insert/home/page up being a row lower is annoying. My sister's laptop has a numeric keypad. Confusifying.

Apparently, when cats rule the world they will ride around on pigs....

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