On 12/20/2015 08:07 AM, Ralph Mowery wrote:
In the 8 th grade about 1964 most everyone had to take a semester of typing.
The room had a lot of typewriters and the keys did not have any leters or
numbers on them so we had to learn to touch type. My mother had a typewriter
just like them but had the leters on the keys. I used it some to type up
papers.

There wasn't a typewriter in sight in my 8th grade in 1960. I can't
remember when my parents bought a typewriter for me but it was an
inexpensive, manual portable job and a joy to use.

It did help some when in college I had to take a semester of computer
programing in PL/1 which was sort of like the BASIC programming. Just
enough to learn what computer programming was about.

My college programming courses were FORTRAN IV and the closest we got to
a typewriter was a keypunch. The theory was you did your programming on
a coding form and then went over to the computer center to punch it in.
In the real (paying job) world it was expected you would give the form
to a keypunch operator.


Move up to about 3 years before the computers came out (the old Radio Shack
and Apples) I started playing around with some ham radio that used the
Teletype machines. The typing started to come back to me. Then enter the
computers and a slightly different keyboards . Letters are in the same
place, but have to look for some of the symbles.

iirc, the early Apples were lacking a key that was sort of important to
a C programmer so you had to fudge it with key mappings. I never had an
Apple but I remember a friend whining about it.

The keys still migrate. I was at the library today and had to hunt
around for Delete. Their keyboards are neither the standard full size
with the numeric part nor the laptop condensed model.