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Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

For sake of reference, in the 1950s my parents both took their theses to a typist, which was the standard operating procedure. You could do it yourself, but multiple copies were needed, and only a typist could do it accurately enough to trust themselves with carbon paper. Correcting mistakes on carbons was a mess.

Chemical diagrams, graphs, and equations, were all done by hand.

Theses were shorter.

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In the late 60s, my mother typed my father's thesis -- because she knew how to touch type and he didn't.

In the mid-1980s, I inherited my mother's Smith-Corona and she sternly informed me that I'd better learn how to type before entering high school, because I was gonna have a lot of papers to write.

That was the best advice that Mom ever gave me. Not only did I top 30wpm by the end of that summer class, I'd met our band director who was the typing teacher, and he'd put me on alto saxophone. I stuck with band for 4 years, learned lots about music and stage performance, earned an academic letter. Fast forward 40 years, and I'm still typing 100wpm and using it professionally, for personal business and recreation. Thanks Mom! Thanks, Smith-Corona!

In the early 1980s our family got an Apple ][+ computer and I started printing out my book reports, etc. for my 5 and 6th grade assignments. My teachers didn’t want to accept them at first thinking that I must somehow be cheating. I’m not sure what that would have involved. Maybe they thought my parents were typing writing them for me and to cover it up, they typed it so the handwriting wouldn’t be different? But it was clear from the content that I wrote them myself, so eventually they accepted it. Here I was trying to make things nicer and they just couldn’t believe it!

Lay people usually think computers are capable of more stuff than what the machines can actually do. I wouldn't put past your teachers to think that the computers at that time could be capable of doing stuff a la ChatGPT, given the prevalence of SciFi movies overhyping computer capabilities.

Same here - my mom insisted I take a touch typing course. Excellent advice!!

Yes! In the summer of 1973, between my 3rd and 4th years of med school (UCLA), I took a basic touch typing class at Sawyer Business College. I was the only male among about 25 people. I got up to about 30wpm which has stood me in good stead in the decades since. One of the best things I ever did in terms of yield on investment.

Same here! But I got up to 70 :0

The most useful class I took in high school was Keyboarding (as they called it), which was done on Selectric typewriters. It was just a single-semester course, but it has done more and lasted longer than any other class.

I'm a millennial born after the introduction of the Macintosh, who took a typing class in a public middle school. I don't remember the application, but it emulated a typewriter. We had to center text manually (count the number of characters, divide by two, backspace that many times, etc). The backspace key didn't delete characters, and mistakes counted against your wpm scores.

I'm a much faster typist if I'm allowed to correct what I'm typing as I go (~75 wpm), but I guess it's useful sometimes to know how to engage the 40wpm "actually get every character exactly right without even looking at the cursor" mode to transcribe documents.

> I guess it's useful sometimes to know how to engage the 40wpm "actually get every character exactly right without even looking at the cursor" mode to transcribe documents.

Just thinking about this makes my spine straighten and my fingers "get ready" to go to the home row :p

We must have used the same application at my school. Though I think I eventually got to 75wpm with no mistakes (or whatever was allowed by the program--three mistakes a minute sticks in my mind but who can remember). It served me well. I live-LaTeXed my lecture notes and homework in college.

I unlearned the habit of backspacing to my mistake, correcting, and retyping. That has served me well.

I wish we had spent more time on accurately typing \ | ( ) , [ ] { } etc.† It would help me now as I still make simple mistakes with that. On the other hand, it only would've been useful to a handful of us.

† In fact, thinking about this brought up the very nostalgic memory of buying C++ for Dummies and the first program listing in it having a vertical pipe character. I had never seen it, and thought it was an ell at first. Well, that didn't compile, so maybe it was a 1? I didn't know! And the listing in the book had an unbroken pipe but my keyboard had a split one, so I couldn't tell these were the same character.

Eventually, I hit every key on the keyboard and then went back through them pressing shift until I found the right character! That was a feeling of enlightenment!

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