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> Western Union expected their Teletype operators to be able to type "blind", with no display or printer to see what they were typing. My aunt taught typing at

by vacri 10y ago

> Western Union expected their Teletype operators to be able to type "blind", with no display or printer to see what they were typing. My aunt taught typing at a girls' high school in the '80s. She was amazingly fast - she bought a typewriter with a memory, and I recall her being finished with a typewritten letter when the page was only one-third of the way through 'printing'. Had to wait for it to finish each time before loading in the next letter. Later in the '80s she got a job as a temp and was working on a computer. Boss comes in and sees here just staring motionless at it: "What are you doing, why aren't you working?". Her response was "I'm just waiting for the computer to catch up". The boss went over to look, and sure enough, the computer was still bringing up what she typed onto the screen...

girvo 10y ago
> "I'm just waiting for the computer to catch up" Heck, even into the mid 90's, my mother would type so fast into Microsoft Word on Windows 95 that she'd have to pause and wait for the computer to catch up to where she'd typed!
taneq 10y ago
I wonder if this is the reason for a generation of two-finger typists? It's not that "old people are incapable of learning to type", just that they grew up with systems which were physically incapable of handling faster input so there was no point until after muscle memory made it too hard to change?
barefootcoder 10y ago
I'm curious about this anecdote. PCs, even into the early 90s, had a keyboard buffer that was only a few dozen characters long, at most. I know because I'd frequently hit it and had learned to stop when I heard the first beep and pick right up where I left off without losing a character once it had time to finish flushing. I don't know of any system where you could have typed enough in advance that you'd have to sit long enough for this conversation to transpire. That said, maybe this could be the case if it was a dumb terminal connected to a unix server and it was buffering in the network stack?

by vacri 10y ago

girvo 10y ago

> "I'm just waiting for the computer to catch up" Heck, even into the mid 90's, my mother would type so fast into Microsoft Word on Windows 95 that she'd have to pause and wait for the computer to catch up to where she'd typed!

taneq 10y ago

I wonder if this is the reason for a generation of two-finger typists? It's not that "old people are incapable of learning to type", just that they grew up with systems which were physically incapable of handling faster input so there was no point until after muscle memory made it too hard to change?

barefootcoder 10y ago

I'm curious about this anecdote. PCs, even into the early 90s, had a keyboard buffer that was only a few dozen characters long, at most. I know because I'd frequently hit it and had learned to stop when I heard the first beep and pick right up where I left off without losing a character once it had time to finish flushing. I don't know of any system where you could have typed enough in advance that you'd have to sit long enough for this conversation to transpire. That said, maybe this could be the case if it was a dumb terminal connected to a unix server and it was buffering in the network stack?