It used to be a legit career choice in Australia in the 1980s - back when I was at high school they taught typing as a vocation. I took typing because I though

It used to be a legit career choice in Australia in the 1980s - back when I was at high school they taught typing as a vocation. I took typing because I thought it would help with my interest in computers although I did work for a time at University as a typist and had to take a typing speed test on a selectric. You could leave high school, do a typing test and enter the public service to join rooms full of people typing up ugly, handwritten garbage from the other public servants. The main impediment to doing that work wasn't the equipment, it was the quality of other peoples handwriting (or shorthand). By the time the 1980s rolled around, you could get typewriters with an entire line of memory and even with erase capabilities but those were conveniences for less experienced typists. If you were typing as a vocation, you learned not to screw up enough that you didn't really need an entire page of text to get it right.