I don’t know. I really wish I could go back in time and see it once more.
I took a Casio electric typewriter with limited memory and a one-line readout screen to my first year of college.
PCs and word processors were already better than a typewriter, but computers were still too expensive for most college kids to own for themselves. You had to go all the way to the computer lab to use Word Star. So if you wanted to work in your own room, an electric typewriter was still useful.
Two years prior, my high school history teacher was still skeptical about letting us use computers to write research papers. I learned to write a paper with footnotes by putting a guideline pattern page underneath the page I was typing on so I could easily monitor my margins and judge when to stop the page so I could for on the footnotes.
Two years later I was using MS Word on the computer lab’s Macintosh II/SEs for writing papers.
Wow! I had something like a Royal HH from the 1950’s that my government-worker aunt picked up at a government auction for me sometime in 1980 or so. So I learned to type, and I used it to make character sheets for D&D, too (my aunt would abuse the government photocopier for us, so we’d have plenty of blank sheets).
I really to believe that using a typewriter helps me be more creative. Once I started fiddling around with word processors on my Commodore 128 (especially when I scored GeoWrite), I paid too much damned attention to formatting, fonts, and other trivial crap.
I have one of the few, if only, typewriters in the hospital. I’m a librarian and used it for catalog cards, etc. Lots of tricks like centering as Dewey Finn mentioned. I love typing (on an IBM Correcting Selectric II, thank you). It’s very soothing.
I hated typewriting. I was so happy when computers and word processing software became available!
That said, my learning to touch type on a typewriter became handy in my software development carreer. Many programmers hunt and peck.
At home we had only a manual typewriter. I used it to write papers in high school, but I would never have been able to learn touch typing on a manual. It required way too much strength for my third and fourth fingers to handle. I learned touch typing on electrics at school.
Touch typing is a skill that has consistently served me well. Do they still teach it in school?
Somehow our family (way back when) acquired a manual typewriter from the school. They used it for a typing class, but the keys were all blank! It made it frustrating at first but you really learned where the letters were without looking.
A few years later I took the high school typing class. Actually I took three semesters! The teacher was the track coach and for my last semester I typed all of the invitational letters, schedules, results, and reports. I got to make ditto sheets and stencil sheets, back before copy machines got cheap enough. Needless to say I got to be very good, and as others have said, it’s a helpful skill as a programmer.
If not, they should. I can’t begin to estimate how much time it has saved me on paperwork over the years. From college papers to military personnel evaluations to resume preparation to just typing on a message board. Eight fingers and a thumb, baby!
I asked some kids once about whether they learned to type in school and was told they call the class “keyboarding”. Now I’m wondering if the schools teach them to type on smart phones, or the kids just pick that up on their own. Because that’s one thing where they’re much better than me.
Best thing I read all day 
!
I would think at this point, kids just learn it naturally, as they grow up using keyboards (or, honestly, they may even be a post-keyboard generation working with tablets and phones.) I grew up in the 80s. We had typing class for one semester in high school (1989). For me, it was absolutely a waste of time. Now, perhaps introducing it very early in the curriculum, like at the early-to-mid primary school level to learn good habits, it may be still be useful, but I’m not entirely sure. Certainly more useful than teaching cursive, at least.
I started on a portable manual in the 1960s. I hated every minute of it. I bought an electric as soon as I could afford one after college. Then an electronic. Then an actual computer in 1985. I have never looked back for even one second.
I’m sorry, can’t believe you learn it “naturally.” It’s something that has to be practiced with deliberation.
I mean, through day-to-day use. I wasn’t formally taught. But I liked to type and use computers as a kid, so by the time I got to high school, I was typing very fast (around 70 wpm at the time; I’m 90-100 wpm now.) It was an organic process like learning how to speak for me and a bunch of other people I grew up with in my generation. If it’s a tool you use everyday from a young age, you get good at it. Meanwhile, I suck at typing on iPads and iPhones. I see kids who grew up with it type several times the speed I can on those things.They didn’t take lessons, but learned it organically, and they will always be faster than I ever will be, as they grew up with it and learned it in a way I would characterize as “naturally.”
I should say “reasonably” rather than “very fast.” The really good typists I know can get to 120+ wpm. But at the time, that was pretty solid, and we were on manual typewriters for the speed tests. I’m sure many freshman would blow me away these days.
Isn’t the point, though, that kids today only use iPads and iPhones rather than computers? A keyboard would be a foreign object when 90+% of their use is on other devices.
Can one get to 120+ words/min on an iPad without resorting to an external keyboard?
Did you actually learn touch-typing without deliberately setting out to learn it and deliberately practice it?
Touch-typing, just to be specific, is typing with all 10 fingers without ever having to look at the keys and using the same finger for the same key every time. You started doing that without deliberately practicing it?
I would say that is correct. I do touch-type, and I never learned it using a specific program or trying to deliberately force myself not to look at the keyboard. It’s something that came naturally from repetition, similar to how with musical instruments, I started out playing by looking at my fingers and then eventually, it was not necessary to do because I’ve been playing with it for so long. That said, while it turns out that most of the fingers I use are the correct ones for touch typing, I don’t always use the same fingers on the same keys (the finger I use may depend on what other finger previously follows it), nor do I always use the keys that apparently are recommended. I type in a way that’s most comfortable and natural to me.
I always thought was a clever trick.
We weren’t taught to do any math though, just center the carriage and read out the letters in the title in pairs, hitting the backspace once for each pair–much easier than actually counting the letters and dividing.
I still find myself doing this in situations where I am working with fixed-width fonts,
such as in source code documentation or designing the output from a command-line interface.