I learned on a manual typewriter in 7th grade, but I got fast on a keypunch. To this day i don't use the right shift key, because it didn't work on a keypunch.

At Berkeley, everybody was already a touch typist. That's why vi commands emphasize lower case letters, especially hjkl which are right under the home position. The original reason for hjkl was the ADM3A, but when I added arrow key support to vi and disabled the hardcoded hjkl, a line of grad students made me put it back.

One of the smartest things my mother did was make me take typing in summer school one year. Little did she or I knew that being able to type 60WPM was going to become a very important asset in my eventual career.

------ Original Message ------

From: "Clem Cole" <clemc@ccc.com>

To: "Will Senn" <will.senn@gmail.com>

Cc: "TUHS main list" <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>

Sent: 2/6/2021 11:55:08 AM

Subject: Re: [TUHS] Typing tutors

On Fri, Feb 5, 2021 at 9:57 PM Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:

I did see mention a while back about a TOPS-10 typing tutor, not unix, but in the spirit - surely there's some unix history around typing tutors.

Nah I just learned to push harder on the ASR-33 keys ;-)

Funny, back-in-the-day, the local public HS had a typing class for the girls, which two of my sisters took. The all-male prep-school where my dad taught and my brothers and I all went, had nothing. But I had access to an ASR-33 and just migrated to it.

To this day, my wife (who is a concert pianist/organist) can touch type but she is amazed at watching me with my 2, 3 or 4 finger style.

Clem

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