From Typing to Keyboarding

I can still hear my Dad telling me when I entered high school, "You are going to take a typing course. Even if you are planning to get married, you never know what might happen and you would need to support yourself!"
Dad needn't have instructed me to take typing. I had been playing "office" since I was six. I had wanted a typewriter forever. I could hardly wait to learn to type!
This is the model typewriter I remember learning on. It was a manual. First you learned to keep your fingers poised above asdf and jkl; (home row). From there you reached for all other letters and symbols. You practiced on a blind keyboard (covered keys) until knowing every letter location became automatic.



Then you began working on your typing speed. Another model typewriter in our classroom was like this Remington Rand. We all had our favourites and tried to get to class early in order to get the one we wanted. A Smith Corona was my preference.
Timed typing exercises were essential in building our WPM speeds. It felt like an unbelievable achievement to be able to type 45 words per minute with no errors!



We had to know everything about the inner workings of our machines - how to change the ribbons - carefully placing them through the guides correctly, how to keep the keys clean and how to unjam them when we got them stuck from trying to type too fast without rhythm.



After learning to type on a manual, using an electric typewriter was fantastic. No more reaching up to return the carriage at the end of a line. Now hitting just one key rolled the paper up and advanced the line of type. Typing speeds increased easily. However, I never broke 70 wpm. My best consistent typing speed by the time the year was over was 68-69 words per minute, net. (Meaning no errors or subtracting points from gross wpm for each error.) It was still about that the last time I took a typing test 23 years later.
I have no idea what my wpm speed is on the computer. Keyboarding (keying?) is so much faster than a typewriter could ever be. My work experience on a computer was more bookkeeping than word processing.

Dad's "never know what might happen" meant being widowed, not divorced, but he was right about me being able to support myself. I worked in many offices and did a lot of typing through the years. Eventually I moved more toward bookkeeping and away from secretarial jobs.
Adding machines, or more correctly, calculators, were already electric by the time I became a proficient "10 key by touch" operator. That means I can total column after column of figures without looking at the keys - and do it without errors.



This blog was inspired by the adding machine Bud bought for me at a garage sale yesterday. It is an old hand-cranked Victor still in its original case. He didn't buy it because I needed an adding machine. He bought it as an interesting display artifact for my office.
I have been trying so hard not to start "collecting" again. But now I'd kind of like having a manual typewriter to go with my adding machine.......