Do you know how to type properly? It's odd that as computers rose to world domination, typing classes declined.
I'm the only person I know who's taken an actual QWERTY-style class. I took "Keyboarding and Word Processing" in high school. It was my parents' idea, which is weird because they rarely give opinions or guidance. I figured it'd be an easy A. I was so pissed when I received a B+ (Seriously? In a class full of pregnant teens and ghetto lip liner?)
But back to QWERTY. It's really bizarre and counterintuitive, right? Turns out it it's supposed to be that way. The first commercially successful typewriter was developed by Christopher Latham Sholes in 1873 with an alphabetical arrangement. However, people became so fast that the keys would jam. Sholes decided to slloooow doooown the tyyyyping. He placed the most frequently used keys as far apart from each other as he could. His keyboard became known as the QWERTY keyboard.
Better systems exist.
The DVORAK keyboard was designed by August Dvorak in the 1930’s. It allows the typist to write over 3,000 words (vs 50) without the fingers reaching. A QWERTY typist's fingers travel 20 miles per day while DVORAK fingers travel only only 12. A test on Navy typists during WW2 showed productivity increase 74% and accuracy 68%.
The MALT keyboard is even better. Devised by Lillian Malt (a beleaguered secretary perhaps?), it eliminated staggered rows, fostered thumb use, and made it easier to reach the backspace and other normally out of the way keys.
Next week: The History of Mechanical Pencils or Something Equally Fascinating.
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6 comments:
Oh, yes, I took a typing class. It was either that or home ec.
"The quick brown fox jumped over the fence."
"The quick brown fox jumped over the fence."
And then we had to learn how to make columns using the programmable tab key function, because I was learning on an actual typewriter. I sucked at programmable tabs. Good thing I faked it and manually tabbed over because it turns out I didn't need to know how to do that, along with how to graph cosins and tangents.
I took typing. It was one of my favorite classes in HS. I took it on a computer though. Typing is right up my alley. A mechanical skill that one can get really good at with almost zero mental effort and a lot of repetition. A little like ping-pong, foosball, doodling, and reading blogs at work.
P.S. it's 'cosines.' 'sin' and 'cos' are abbreviations of 'sine' and 'cosine.' sorry, I had to point that out after PETE lectured me for a half-hour about where the punctuation goes relative to the quotation marks.
"I'm the only person I know who's taken a QWERTY-style typing class."
NOT.
That class in HS was awesome b/c attendance wasn't mandatory. All you had to do was get the work done, didn't matter it you did a week's worth in one day. Once you got good at typing it was piece of cake.
I took a typing class in high school, too. It was actually called Computer Science, because in addition to learning to type we spent four weeks learning to program in some already-long-obsolete programming language.
The interesting thing about that typing class was that it was only one semester; the other semester was devoted to an econ class (Free Enterprise), in which classes were split into groups, created a product, and then had that product manufactured and sold it themselves and kept the proceeds. Great class. The things is: who the hell says, "OK, so let's just teach them economics for four months; then after winter break we'll teach them how to type."?
I took the same class at Grossmont, with the teacher with the perm and a last name that started with M? Mathis maybe? Anyway, I know I sat next to Shareef and played a lot of that DOS skiing game, and I also had Ms. Mathis for QBASIC programming, where I made a tic-tac-toe program for my final project. Go Hillers.
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