> I did take typing in HS. It really helped me in the Army. I
> became a RTT operator and could really push those 60 CPS
> teletype machines.
I'd forgotten all about that: With the slower teletype machines (10 CPS on a
good day), to type at all fast, you had to learn to keep pressure on each
key until it went down. Rather than jamming (like a regular typewriter),
the old ASR/KSR 33 teletypes just wouldn't let the key go down.
For me, typing was a required subject in both 7th & 8th grade. Bunch of
worn out old mechanical Underwood typewriters, which would insert extra
spaces at random. Kind of a Catch-22, extra spaces counted as errors, but
you couldn't tell when it inserted a space except by watching what you
typed, which also counted as an error. But the classroom had two Royals,
that weren't as badly worn out (probably donated later), so I learned to
rush to typing class so I could grab one of the good typewriters. Class was
held in the basement under a church, with drain pipes overhead that would
leak when they were used. So, you also had to be careful to sit away from
the leaks; otherwise you'd hear a toilet flush and then get a drop of
"water" on your head. Good times at the hands of the public school system!
I didn't use it much until 12th grade, when I took a course in computer
programming; but I've been a fair touch typist ever since. No idea how many
lines of code I've typed (does fixing someone else's code count?), but it's
a bunch.
-- Randall
** triumphs@autox.team.net **
Archive: http://www.team.net/pipermail/triumphs http://www.team.net/archive
|