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Comment by scar | Hacker News Reader

There's such an annoying scene in the first episode of that show that kinda broke the immersion for me.

They introduced Cameron Howe as some sort of world class hacker that could do anything so one of her first scenes was her typing something.. and typing she did, one finger at a time.

I mean, wtf.

World class hacker that literally types one finger at a time, like she had never used a keyboard before.

That scene nearly made me quit the show right there and then.

Whenever I see that actress in something else I just can't help but think back about she couldn't even be bothered to learn how to type.

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> World class hacker that literally types one finger at a time, like she had never used a keyboard before.

Vladimir Horowitz very famously played a televised concert back in the 80s where, for the first time, a few cameras stayed focused closely on his hands. He had horrible technique. It was horrible by his own professed standard: for most of the fundamental things he himself taught to his students, he was doing the opposite! This was broadcast to millions of people. Piano teachers everywhere were pissed.

While that bad technique isn't particularly noticeable in the resulting sound for that concert, there's an analysis somewhere that shows the damage it did as he aged. You can hear certain problems he was having in his later recordings, and video from the same period confirms that the bad technique (like straining the wrist on octaves) was the culprit[1].

In any case, all kinds of world class people do all kinds of fucked up shit.

Edit:

1: In other words, when he was middle-aged he could play octaves accurately with a strained wrist, but he couldn't do that in old age. However, if he had been leveraging the weight/power of his entire arm for the octaves, he would have gotten accuracy in both cases.

2: IIRC, he didn't realize what his technique looked like until someone showed him the video. :)

At 2000s-era Google, I was fortunate to work with some famous 70s-80s era software engineers whose contributions to computing are on a similar scale to what is shown in HCF. Some of them typed with two fingers, some of them did not know or use any keyboard shortcuts.

You are looking for the wrong badge.

That feels entirely realistic for the time to me. It would certainly’ve been realistic to my formative years in the industry (a little later - turn of the century).

I still can’t ‘properly’ touch-type.

Lots of people were typing like that. As far as typing today, different layouts, hobbies with ergonomic keyboards etc we see far more people touch typing today than were in the 80's. I wouldn't call it abnormal, I was pecking - very quickly for a long time before I ever knew what vi was. I found vi on my first unix login in '85 and still pecked at it. I also know that today, with far more people typing, less of them probably gain the same knowledge as we did hacking back then. Good typing can't replace your computer knowledge. Today I never look at my keyboard, it's 36 keys and its no use looking as no symbol represents what happens when you press the key. I am a better typist, not better at software though.

When I was a kid in the 80s I noticed a lot of hackers of that era that typed like that. I thought it was strange at the time, but not at all uncommon

It may have been (probably was) a conscious choice illustrating how new things were (i.e. those people didn’t grow up typing to a level where it was muscle memory). Also, keyboard layouts on early machines were far from standardized (other than the qwerty letters, almost every other symbol was not in a standard location from machine to machine), so even if you knew one machine you might not know others.

Most actors and directors put a lot of thought into small details like this, so when you see something like this it’s often intentional.

The only reason I learned to touch type was out of boredom and the fact that the only “game” for the TI99/4a system (it had an “extender” with floppy drive and ran some spreadsheet) that my dad brought home from work at weekends was a touch typing tutor. When I started CS, I was in the tiny minority in my class that could touch type. During an introductory lecture for the course, one of the tips was “learn to touch type”.

I'm from back then, love programming, and I can't type. Just can't be bothered learning how; it's not the bottleneck.

Keypunch operators learned to type with just their index fingers. I saw this with some older operators of the airline ticketing system at the airport years ago.

I didn't even notice that bit.

What broke the show for me was some hot peroxide blonde doing what was really done by a slightly dumpy guy in an isolated office.

I just can't watch shows that fictionalize history from my field of work. My dad's a musician and he's the same with his field.

I'm fine with that. I read the history book or watch the documentary instead.

My dad was a programmer in the 70s and 80s and, to this day, he types with both middle fingers and that's it.

You'd be surprised how many world class X often have gaps in their fundamentals. In fighting games, I often find great players don't do the technical optimization stuff I do. They're way better without it.

My father is a journalist and learned to type by himself on typewriters using his index fingers. He writes a lot and he is really fast. I don't have any issues with that.

My dad was a great programmer... who typed with a terrible two finger peck technique. It was infuriating to watch as a kid.

Typing was not a core skill. He had secretaries for that. A lot of the early typing he did was on a keypunch when an operator wasn't available; "proper" early mechanical keypunch technique was index fingers only because of the high forces involved.

My memories of the early 80's have a lot of "computer people" -- both older mainframe types like my dad, and younger people -- typing like that.

Mario teaches typing hadn't been invented yet!

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