> No home row bullshit. No "proper finger placement." Just pure, chaotic rhythm.
This is me too. I've been a "high speed hunt and peck" typist since I starting using computers in 1985. I highly recommend it.
Being able to type fast does make computers vastly more enjoyable to use. Using computers every day was all the practice I needed to make me type faster. IRC and AIM in the 90s/00s were the big drivers for fast typing. In my teens and twenties I topped 120 WPM with reasonable accuracy.
I've slowed down in my "old age", and my accuracy has gotten pretty bad. Then again, I think keyboards have gotten worse, too. I use mostly non-contoured chicklet key shitty laptop keyboards today. It might be interesting to wire up an AT-to-PS/2-to-USB franken-dongle, connect one of the keyboards from my youth, and see how it feels. I don't think I'd be willing to sacrifice the desk space, though, to daily-drive that kind of setup.
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Aside: I was the last class in my high school to have typing class on electric typewriters. I struck a tenuous bargain with the teacher whereby I'd do the work without complaint and he'd avert his eyes from my "improper" technique. The "home row" exercises were excruciating time sucks, but once we got into actually typing real English text it was fine. The tactile response and feel of an electric typewriter is pretty cool.
I skipped typing classes altogether, and I'm not sure how; they were a requirement in every school district I attended and a prerequisite to the programming classes that I took instead. My typing has developed "organically"; I use most of my fingers at least sometimes, but heavier on index and middle.
> IRC and AIM in the 90s/00s were the big drivers for fast typing.
Those are how I developed my touch typing; the incentive was to see everything happening in the chatroom full of friends without missing anything, and being able to react quickly.
> The tactile response and feel of an electric typewriter is pretty cool.
Granddad was a retired IBM employee, and had a Selectric typewriter (either II or III, not sure). That thing felt (and sounded) awesome. The whir of the flywheel, the amazing feedback of the "thunk" of the ball hitting the ribbon. I used to type random crap that didn't need to be typed just to use that thing for a few minutes.
My typing class was one of the first in my school to use computers. Honestly we were probably a couple years behind other schools in this regard. I can still remember some of the students breaking down in tears because up until that point in their lives, they’d never touched a computer. These were high schoolers around 1997 or so.
For me it was MERC flavored DikuMUDs. When you're fighting a strong boss and you need to communicate with your team, you gotta be able to issue commands to the server as well as carry a conversation with your teammates.
This is me too. I've been a "high speed hunt and peck" typist since I starting using computers in 1985. I highly recommend it.
Being able to type fast does make computers vastly more enjoyable to use. Using computers every day was all the practice I needed to make me type faster. IRC and AIM in the 90s/00s were the big drivers for fast typing. In my teens and twenties I topped 120 WPM with reasonable accuracy.
I've slowed down in my "old age", and my accuracy has gotten pretty bad. Then again, I think keyboards have gotten worse, too. I use mostly non-contoured chicklet key shitty laptop keyboards today. It might be interesting to wire up an AT-to-PS/2-to-USB franken-dongle, connect one of the keyboards from my youth, and see how it feels. I don't think I'd be willing to sacrifice the desk space, though, to daily-drive that kind of setup.
---
Aside: I was the last class in my high school to have typing class on electric typewriters. I struck a tenuous bargain with the teacher whereby I'd do the work without complaint and he'd avert his eyes from my "improper" technique. The "home row" exercises were excruciating time sucks, but once we got into actually typing real English text it was fine. The tactile response and feel of an electric typewriter is pretty cool.