Thankfully I only ever had to footnote one or two papers. By the time I was required to do it endnotes had become the norm so I was generally spared that bit of evil.
I occasionally used the Selectric at my father’s office after hours. It had the built in correction ribbon and the “X” button which would automatically back it up. It had a small memory of some sort that remembered several letters so I could correct a word if I had to. Unfortunately, I got so used to that button that, when I’d return to college and use my own typewriter (which didn’t have it) I kept banging my right pinkie on the base of the keyboard to no avail.
Also, one time I was working on a paper while sitting in an easy chair with the typewriter on my lap. I dosed off momentarily while typing and I fully expected the last line I typed to be something like “The first amendment has been interpreted to mean I’ve got to go because the banana is ready.” But when I looked at it, it was actually comprehensible.
Sadly, the school never did fund my “sleep-typing” research.
First exposure was typing BASIC programs into my Commodore 64 when I was 5 or 6. My grandmother, who lived with us off and on when I was a kid, used to be a secretary so she ended up typing my papers for me most of the time. She typed so fast that she used to break some of the early typewriters. She remembers being ecstatic when they first introduced the ball-typewriters because she’d stick the keys together when she got going fast. It sounded like a machine-gun on full auto when she typed. She hated the electric typewriter we got at first because it was too sensitive and would double letters sometimes.
Around the beginning of high school she decided that I needed to learn how to type. She taught me the basics: home row, how to reach for the keys, and then let me go. After a couple of practice sessions, I could type at around 20 WPM, but I still looked at my hands too much, so she covered up the keys. That helped break that habit, at least for the normal characters. I learned on that electric typewriter. It had no correction tape; we used correction film instead. Big errors would require a completely re-typed page. I hated that.
The first time I used a computer (a Macintosh) in college to type my reports, I loved it. I’ve always been prone to errors because I’m left-handed. If I try to type too quickly, my right hand can’t keep up and I transpose letters. With wordprocessors, no problem, just backspace and re-type.
The habit of instantaneously hitting backspace is the unfortunate side effect of doing most of my typing on a computer. When I had to take a typing test for a temp agency, any other character other than the one in the copy was counted as an error by the testing program. I had several words worth of delete key strikes that brought my typing speed down to around 50 WPM. If it had counted (words - errors in the final product) / time, I would have probably gotten around 60+ WPM. Another habit, possibly due to my mostly self-taught style, is that I almost always use my right thumb to hit the space bar. When the keyboard starts showing a bit of wear, I get a spot that is worn smooth on the bar just to the right of center because of this.
I learned in a typing class I took in the tenth grade. We had covers over the keyboards so that we were forced to blind type. That’s the only way to learn and it didn’t hurt that the teacher used to make her rounds with a ruler.
Mrs. Thompson, ‘The Antichrist Typing Teacher’ ™, in high school. She was a wicked, wicked, old gal. She sure knew her stuff, though! I ended up typing 80wpm, with a few errors, by the end of the sememster.
My daughter had her in her freshman year, too.
She aced the class at 95wpm, no errors. Imagine. I sure can’t do that!
I didn’t have time to take typing in high school, which appalled my grandmother. She bought me a “Teach yourself to type” book and I actually did it. Wouldn’t be where I am without it, since I got in the door as a temp who could type 65ish wpm.
My mother strongly urged, insisted, threw me out of the house during 7th grade summer vacation (1971). She thought computers might take off. Silly woman with only a HS education. What did she know. Should have asked her for advise on the stock market.
Years later I needed to type 40 wpm so I bought an electric. Let me tell you, the Readers Digest is not the best source to practice with. Lots of annotation.
I bought a computer in college to get ahead of the game. This was back when computers didn’t have hard drives. You booted them up with a DOS disk and then loaded up the software you wanted to run. Your printer driver was built into the software you were running so you had to choose software to match hardware. You also had to manually make changes to the operating system to get things to work.
I swear my professors conspired against my new secret weapon by increasing the number of pages in each term paper.
Senior year in high school. I learned on a manual typewriter that had no letters on the keys. We had to memorize the key positions by doing repetitive drills out the wazoo.
I must say, though, that it was probably the one course that I took in high school that really had some practical value.
I mostly learned to type, the physical act of typing, in junior high, at a typing class that consisted entirely of sitting in a room using a typing tutor program on a bunch of ancient Apple IIe machines. I still mostly hunt-and-pecked though until I discovered the internet and, coincidentally met Mr. Armadillo (online). I honed my mad typing skills through several years of AOL IM as the main route of communication between myself and my beloved, and subsequently learned to type with blazing speed and mostly excellent accuracy. For some reason, though, I somehow picked up the habit of only ever using the right shift key, and will (as someone described above) contort my hands into odd positions if needs be to get to it.
I used to hunt and peck term papers and such on an ancient manual typewriter that belonged to my neighbor. When I got into Jr. High school, a select few of us were put into a special program to fiddle with one of those new fangled computer thingies (a TRS-80 model 1 with a cassette interface… wheee!). Eventually the county’s computer science program (which was called computer math at first) evolved out of what we were doing. By the time I got to high school I could type reasonably fast, but I had never had any sort of typing training so my fingers were all on the wrong keys, etc. I took a summer class to learn FORTAN on a Honeywell mainframe computer, and they taught typing to us as well. The typing class was taught like a regular secretary type typing class, and the instructor (a little old woman who was used to teaching girls how to type) didn’t know a thing about computers. She was teaching us things like use a lower case L to make a 1, until I pointed out that computers weren’t very happy if you did that. Anyway, she did at least get my fingers on the right keys.
Unfortunately, though, I could type faster using my “incorrect” method than I could using her “correct” method, so once the class was over I quickly went back to my old way of typing. I got a brand spanking new Commodore 64 computer in high school (I guess you can tell by the computers I’m mentioning that I’m an old fart) and in three years of high school I literally wore out the keyboard and had to replace it. Part of it was from playing games, and part of it was from writing programs, and part of it was from writing really horrible novels which I thankfully threw into the trash later. Back then you didn’t just go down to ye ol local computer store (because there wasn’t one) and get a new keyboard. You ordered a new keyboard from an electronics supply house, and when it came in, you disassembled the computer (the commodore 64 had it’s “motherboard” inside the keyboard) and installed the new keyboard, some soldering required.
Years later, a secretary at work commented that she was amazed at how fast I typed considering how wrong I did it.
I just tried an online typing test and was up around 90 WPM, but I find it rather awkward to copy someone else’s text. I type a lot faster than that if I am composing something myself or writing code.
