3 ms·

How did you get on with the keyboard? Also feel the advent GSM mobiles which brought T9 input killed that off. But read reports iirc of 60wpm being achieved b

by Zenst 5y ago

How did you get on with the keyboard? Also feel the advent GSM mobiles which brought T9 input killed that off. But read reports iirc of 60wpm being achieved by many, which whilst not epic, is darn impressive for one hand. Though looking at the Morse code wpm world record, it seems like track and field skills from the arcade days were left untapped in today's keyboard days.

cjbprime 5y ago
I was around 12 years old, so not super well :) But oddly I ended up working on text entry after graduating from college, working on a system called Dasher. I type qwerty around 130wpm, so I appreciate the arcade skills. I'd love to get into stenography but it seems like the amount of memorizing involved is akin to learning a new foreign language, too much to learn as a hobby.
- Zenst 5y ago
  > I'd love to get into stenography but it seems like the amount of memorizing involved is akin to learning a new foreign language, too much to learn as a hobby. Why learn when you can invent your own shorthand, more natural for you and unless you want somebody else to read the shorthand - not an issue and even then can just translate with a script. When I started out programming (COBOL) in the early 80's we had a choice of typing coding sheets to send to the typing pool or use one of the terminals and type them ourselves. So I did my own shorthand and a script (was Honeywell Bull DPS88 running GCOS 8) that would expand the shorthand into the code, of which for COBOL, was lots of typing tokenisations to be done. I expanded it to do most of the Identification etc, pop the date written in and that. Heck I even had it generating a test framework for the code and all this allowed me to churn thru programming faster than the analysts could keep up. Personal best was 26 programs written, tested and signed off by auditors in a day. In a way I kinda wrote what would be known as a framework in a sense in the end as had common aspects like error handling handled automaticlly by the translation. So in the end I wasn't having to type much in for some programs. Moral being, why learn something complicated when you may very well be able to invent and use a more natural form yourself and evolve it from there.
  - cjbprime 5y ago
    > Why learn when you can invent your own shorthand If I don't want to sign up for learning a new language, I should hardly sign up for creating one :)

by Zenst 5y ago

cjbprime 5y ago

I was around 12 years old, so not super well :) But oddly I ended up working on text entry after graduating from college, working on a system called Dasher. I type qwerty around 130wpm, so I appreciate the arcade skills. I'd love to get into stenography but it seems like the amount of memorizing involved is akin to learning a new foreign language, too much to learn as a hobby.

Zenst 5y ago
> I'd love to get into stenography but it seems like the amount of memorizing involved is akin to learning a new foreign language, too much to learn as a hobby. Why learn when you can invent your own shorthand, more natural for you and unless you want somebody else to read the shorthand - not an issue and even then can just translate with a script. When I started out programming (COBOL) in the early 80's we had a choice of typing coding sheets to send to the typing pool or use one of the terminals and type them ourselves. So I did my own shorthand and a script (was Honeywell Bull DPS88 running GCOS 8) that would expand the shorthand into the code, of which for COBOL, was lots of typing tokenisations to be done. I expanded it to do most of the Identification etc, pop the date written in and that. Heck I even had it generating a test framework for the code and all this allowed me to churn thru programming faster than the analysts could keep up. Personal best was 26 programs written, tested and signed off by auditors in a day. In a way I kinda wrote what would be known as a framework in a sense in the end as had common aspects like error handling handled automaticlly by the translation. So in the end I wasn't having to type much in for some programs. Moral being, why learn something complicated when you may very well be able to invent and use a more natural form yourself and evolve it from there.
- cjbprime 5y ago
  > Why learn when you can invent your own shorthand If I don't want to sign up for learning a new language, I should hardly sign up for creating one :)