Thursday, July 16, 2009

ON TOUCH-TYPING

I have in the past alluded the the painful truth that my mad, 1337* typing skills hover in the grey muck between two-finger typing and being able to reliably touch-type, I hope nearer the latter. There are fixes for that, the diresome sink-or-swim blank keytops of your High School Typing or Data Entry or Keyboarding class being a prime example of one approach.

There is another, a bit lazier but perhaps better for a late adopter looking to change her habits, and nice example showed up on an auction site last week. I set my sights on it, bid, won and it arrived today:A Remington 5 with color-coded keytops to remind the hapless which finger goes where! It's in nice shape, too; a little dusty and a few dings in the paint but not totally beat up and the keys I have tried are working well. Plus, it's got that zoomy streamlining, so you know it won't overheat when one's speed reaches the practical limit.

A little Goop to clean the exterior, some Flitz for the plated metal and de-mustification for the case....
______________________________
* Here's just how 'leet I am: years ago, I lived in an apartment in an old, Victorian house at No. 1337!

6 comments:

  1. I never learned touch-typing, and I regret it. When I was in high-school, the only people taking typing classes were girls, and guys who wanted to be writers or journalists.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Typing class was one of the best classes I ever took in high school. Our school had just upgraded to electric typewriters (fancy!). It would still be a couple of years before I laid my hands on a computer. My typewriter at home was a manual.

    I pound the keyboard pretty good - still hitting the keys like I did on the old manual. I also type very quickly. My partner at work calls it "angry typing" :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. EEEEEEEEEEEEEE WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hah! My Grandma had one of those. She taught me how to type on it when I was in elementary school.

    Very cool. Man talk about deja vu. Just seeing that typewriter brings back so many memories.

    Hope you enjoy it.

    Joe

    ReplyDelete
  5. Self-taught typist, and I can always tell folks who took formal classes, because they always make nasty cracks about my typing style.

    In AIT I was just grateful to pass the typing test, officially 25 WPM, one mistake, because I stopped when I reached the designated minimum number of words to pass. (Well, grateful to pass, and to not have one of the blank keyboards in the room...)

    Later, post-Army retirement when I was getting desperate for a job, the temp agency I applied at officially rated me at 45+, no mistakes. Of course, it's easy to when it's a computer...

    ReplyDelete
  6. While they tried to teach me in 7th grade it didn't stick till later trying to type large programs on ASR-33 TTY or later terminals hooked to PDP-8i. Since then I've acquired many old computers but the ASR-33 has been banned for noise and space considerations but not the PDP-8f!

    I hate most current computer keyboards for both feel and the caps lock convention used.

    ReplyDelete