Does anyone actually type these days?

[Jan]

I'm a touch typist - it's a very useful skill, it was compulsory at my senior school. I find it hard to hand write letters now though, I do it but I get pains up the side of my hand after not to long at all.

Regards,

[RuralWeb]

30 years ago after finishing basic training in the Army I thought great now I can get out there and learn to kill people but oh no I had to sit in a classroom for 3 weeks learning to type! WTF.

Several years later sat in a ditch being shot at I remember thinking wow glad I learnt to type

[bamboo]

Don't know how you are learning, but my eldest is dyslexic (why did they make that such a hard word to learn?) and he is learning to type using Englishtype senior (recommended by his tutor). He's already 90+% accurate and he's only been doing it a week or so. I was a poor 80%! D

I'm using this and I am actually getting the hang of it.

[jont]

Several years later sat in a ditch being shot at I remember thinking wow glad I learnt to type

Did you not construct a makeshift trebuchet from the trench boards and launch the typewriter at the cads shooting at you?

[oldhasbeen]

Old school touch typist here - used to be able to hit 180 wpm in my prime

I started out at school on the oldest manual typewriters known to mankind, then progressed into the workplace and started using the second oldest manual typewriters known to mankind. The ones with the clunky keys and the manual carriage return bar which sent your coffee flying off the desk if you put your mug in the wrong place. The amount of time spent unlocking those damn keys, re-inking and re-rolling those fabric ribbons. Do you remember the ones which were black one half/red the other half? And don't even get me started on Tippex.

Then it went onto those awful semi-manual, semi-electric typewriters - don't know if anybody else remembers the "golfballs" - then the semi-word processor that had a wee little screen where you could preview the mistakes you were about to make before you made them anyway.

In the world of computers where it would seem logical that touch typing would come into its own, it's not taught in schools and nobody learns how to do it anymore. I find this totally bizarre.

Touch typing rocks.