Ah, you too can relive high school typing classes.
10
Replies
0
Boosts
@ai6yr I don’t think those were available at my small school; I regretted it later. I did gradually teach myself in college. It would have been handy to know how sooner, though.
Typing wasn't taught in my highly academic girls' school because we were expected to be professional and therefore not able to type. (Dressmaking/needlework was taught because that's an acceptable hobby.)
So I taught myself to type in my 20s.
But I am so, so, grateful to have been taught latin
@regordane @cavyherd @gannet WHAT?!?! "not be able to type" is professional? Yikes.
(though... this corresponds with the "not knowing how to do domestic skill stuff" my mother had to deal with, because that is "servants work"...)
@ai6yr Hey, in my typing class, it was big old MANUAL typewriters, manual like the one I had at home. I still consider the course (in Jr. High) to have been the single most useful school course I ever took. At the time I thought it would help me with term papers and such. I couldn't have imagined that I'd be spending my entire career at a keyboard touch-typing, as at this very moment.
@lauren @ai6yr one hundred percent. And the manual typewriter (and I also took piano classes for many years) made you strong enough to keep your posture and habits good enough to avoid repetitive motion problems. Tho my typing accuracy on glass screens with autocorrect has gotten atrocious. My typing teacher and my editor mom would be ashamed of many of my unedited postings.
@lauren @ai6yr I miss being able to type without looking at the typed output - I still do but then have to spend thirty seconds per sentence going back to fix it up, with normal luck. And I used to type trust documents (which can't have erased / white out on them). Each page was perfect then I'd take a breath and start the next one.
@ai6yr Unfortunately I was just a bit early to be able to use the computers for final printouts to turn in. While I had access to the "TN" print chain on the IBM 360/91 at UCLA, and it produced very nice upper/lowercase printouts on 8 1/2 x 11 paper when finished, you needed to pull off feed holes on the sides, which always left edges unsuitable for turning in. Missed it by that much! At the UCLA ARPANET lab (ARPANET/Internet site #1), we had one of the full-size phototypesetters that could be driven by TROFF, but it just was expensive and time-consuming to use.
@lauren Ha! Funny... I guess, definitely a handy skill for the computer age.
