I took typing in high school, one of the few times I listened to advice from my elders back then “take typing, it’ll come in handy later”.
And what do you know, it DID payoff over the years!
Self taught. I learned to type playing ultima online before voice chat was big. I often found myself needing to type stuff while also using the mouse to get away from things trying to kill and loot me (and not always in that order). After a while it becomes almost instinctual. In a way playing games online without voice chat is a great way to learn typing. You have a situation where you’re greatly encouraged to type fast, but you also can’t spend too much time looking at the keyboard. These days everyone is on voice chat though i guess.
I don’t know how people can do any sort of job that even somewhat involves a computer these days without being able to type to some degree.
The typing class i took in school was mostly useless and once someone found a copy of sim tower on the network, most people spent their time either with the mouse or pushing alt tab.
Nope. I started typing on a manual, and simple didn’t have the hand strength at the time to get those pinky keys to strike, so bad habits have persisted all my life.
And it gets worse, the company I was working for made not one, but two typing tutors! Every time I touch type I start hitting two keys at once and it drives me nuts, not to mention I start getting carpal tunnel symptoms, so I just stop and go back to my usual.
Determined that my son wouldn’t have the same problem, I chained him to the keyboard and made him learn how to touch type. The poor kid had tears streaming down and his face, but never stopped typing. It did pay off though - he types at a blistering speed now. It helps that he got his mother’s tapering fingertips rather than my broader ones.
Playing Quakeworld teamgames in the age before voice comms and the proxies that allowed for location and item reporting meant that you got good at typing very quickly indeed.
I consider Mavis Beacon to be my arch-nemesis. I have bought the program three times – versions 9, 15 and 20. In version 15 she started out very kind and supportive: “Just take your time and focus on accuracy at first” but as I progressed through the lessons the tone of the feedback shifted. Eventually she pretty much told me, “You’re still really slow. We can skip ahead if you want. I won’t tell anyone (that you’re a borderline typing retard).”
My more recent experience with Mavis has been more pleasant but I’m not sure how much time it would take to undo nearly 35 years of typing the ‘wrong’ way. Too much, probably. So I content myself with about 45 WPM using a couple of fingers and my thumb. I wrote a 50,000 word novel in 21 days last year using this method, so I don’t feel I’m missing out on touch-typing except for the nerd cool factor.
My dad gave me a challenge in 7th grade. I was spending a lot of time on the PC and my grades had actually slipped a bit. I was SUPER into Civilization, a little game by some guy called Meyer or something, and some gory death-a-thon called Immortal. Anyway, he said if, in four months I couldn’t type at 35wpm with 90% accuracy, he’d junk the computer. He gave me a copy of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing and walked away.
Three months later he said, “I wasn’t kidding, you know, about taking the computer away…” and I literally got a surge of adrenaline. I hadn’t spent a MINUTE practicing. I had forgotten all about it. So I installed MB and got to typing. There was this game where you were in a car, driving down a country highway, and for every mistake you made a bug would splat on the windshield. After a couple dozen errors, you couldn’t see shit and would lose.
I totally made the deadline, too. I showed my dad my results like three weeks later and he was happy and impressed. That Xmas he told me if I could get up to 50wpm with 90% accuracy he’d buy more RAM (4mb!) or a new HD. I never bothered with that, but I still have the card, and my typing skills keep getting better and better. Thanks Dad! <3
Dammit. Thanks to this thread, I’ve just noticed that I never use the right Shift key when touch-typing. If I have to type, say, “A”, I actually hold Shift with my left pinky and hit “A” with my ring finger.
I blame the right Shift key requiring significantly more motion to reach than the left.
This is one of those moments where you realize the bushes are just green colored cloud sprites…
I HAVE A RIGHT SHIFT KEY!?!?!?
I can touch type so long as I don’t think about it. The moment I think about it, my speed plummets, my accuracy goes to hell, and I start glancing down.
I considered getting something like thisto get over that hump, but then I realized that I don’t really want to imagine what key config for games would feel like. Does anyone actually use one of those?
I can type around 100 wpm. I remember we had the Mastertype program on the Commodore 64 back in the day. You’d type words to shoot aliens. We weren’t a Mavis Beacon household.
My typing skills grew slowly. I don’t think I was a great typist even in high school, but by the time I got through college I’d achieved good proficiency.
edit: 99 wpm, 0 errors, from sinnick’s link.
Just took that test and got 27 wpm. I’m not very fast typing what I read.
I also took a typing a class in high school. The computers were all networked so we spent most of our time playing doom and multiplayer hearts, best class ever.
That’s how I sped up too, except it was Counter-Strike. I never felt a need to type much in games before that.
I’m young enough that I learned to read with computers, so I imagine they were teaching us how to type (can’t remember for sure if it came that year or later) while we were learning how to read & write with early graphical adventures & a simple DOS text program that would print out the words we came up with for later study.
These days I type 88 WPM (I’m apparently very consistent) including mistakes on speed tests, but I’m typing this post at something closer to 70 WPM.
I have two computers at this desk without enough room for two keyboards, so the secondary keyboard is behind this one, underneath the desk. I can touch type with 2 inches of clearance for my fingers. I’m not sure that helps with typing, but being able to find keys without the option of looking down is a good skill that transferred to my piano playing around the same time.
I touch type fine until I realize that I’m touch typing and I look at the keyboard.
112 with 97% accuracy by sinnick’s link, so I’ve gotten slower but more accurate in my old age. That dropped down to 97 wpm with no mistakes on the zebra one though. Fucking z’s.
I can touch type. Even working at a game developer, I’m the fastest typer in the office, even over all our engineers. I’m not even incredibly fast, averaging about 85 wpm. So I got the job of typing during all of our meetings for the benefit of our lead artist, who is deaf. Others in the office have tried and failed to keep up with me. Bwahahahaha!
I took typing classes in middle school, but it never clicked until I started playing MUDs a few years later. After about a year or so of playing one, I realized I was typing without looking at the keyboard. I’ve only gotten better since. Though it’s weird; I use all five fingers “correctly” on my left hand, but on my right hand I only use my ring finger to hit backspace and my pinky to hit enter. Everything else that “should” be hit with those fingers, I hit with my middle finger.
I can touch-type at about 29 WPM, or using my normal four-finger typing method, about 62 WPM. Obviously if I were willing to spend more time training my touch-typing I could improve on that, but, meh, I’m lazy.
I took a semester typing course in 7th grade, which was probably one of the only smart things I did in my formative years. We learned to type on a combination of traditional typewriters and computers, alternating between typing drills (with your hands covered!) on the typewriters and software like Mavis Beacon on the computers. I got into the habit early of fixing mistakes as I go along, and I’m good enough at recognizing when I’ve mistyped that I rarely leave typos in place. Consequently it’s really tough for me to score high on those typing speed drills but if you factor in the corrections I probably average 50-60 words per minute.
Just took the test in sinnicks link, faster than I expected.
First pass:
Astronauts
391 chars
in 1:00 min. Accuracy 97% 2 errors
deducted
Second pass:
Tigers
438 chars
in 1:00 min. Accuracy 98% 1 errors
deducted
I often do touch type, but that accomplishes little. I mean, it’s not Braille or anything, so I get no information out of it, and truth be told it feels just like blank paper. And you just have to move your hand away again to read it.
I type around 100 wpm, and I can sustain that for extremely long periods of time. I learned using a crappy typewriter, most of the time with a ribbon which had been used a few times so barely left any kind of ink impression. I often get exclamations of surprise when people see my fingers moving. They stay they can’t follow them at all.
The Astronaut one was brutal for me.