I just tested myself on a typing speed test and scored 140 WPM with 100% accuracy. It made me curious as to how much faster it’s physically possible for someone to type. I looked on guiness’ world record site but I couldn’t find a record for this.
So what’s the fastest anyone has ever been able to type?
Also - is there a standard way of getting WPM from keystrokes? I mean - a standard divisor for the number of characters in a word? Otherwise, if one test uses 6 characters per word, and one uses 5, a 1000 character test done in 2 minutes would give 83 WPM for 6 character words and 100 WPM for 5 character words.
Stephen Jay Gould, I believe it’s him, has a story in one of his books of young children brought up with keyboards at the same time as crayons etc. The keyboards are the more efficient Dvorak (spelling?) configuration and he mentions a record breaking pace of typing amongst them. Around 200 wpm iirc.
BTW the story is to exemplify a principle that; best does not equal successful in evolutionary terms.
“Typing, Fastest. Mrs. Barbara Blackburn of Salem, Oregon can maintain 150 wpm for 50 min (37,500 key strokes) and attains a speed of 170 wpm using the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard (DSK) system. Her top speed was recorded at 212 wpm. Source: Norris McWhirter, ed. (1985), THE GUINNESS BOOK OF WORLD RECORDS, 23rd US edition, New York: Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.”
The inventor of one of the various chording keyboards claimed to be able to do 200 WPM with the thing - one handed. Of course, one doesn’t know if he was really typing randomly selected text, and how long he could maintain that rate. Or how long he had to practice with his device to be able to do it. I seem to recall that a few people did report that he could type damned fast with it.
(The one I’m thinking of wasn’t commercially produced, ASFAIK. The buttons related very logically to the ASCII codes for the characters, and you basically commited the ASCII table to memory to learn to use it.)