The March of Progress

NOW IS THE TIME FOR ALL GOOD MEN
TO COME TO THE AID OF THE PARTY.

This evening I was typing a comment on Kat's blog when Helena came into the room. I looked round at her and continued to type. She was surprised that I could still produce coherent text without looking at either the screen or the keyboard. Okay, coherent might not be the right word for my blog comments. Correctly spelt, maybe. Most of the time.

This is because I learnt to type when I was a child. At school they taught me useful things like reading, and writing, and counting, and French verbs. At least they tried to teach me French, but either they failed to do this, or I failed to learn.

You could also learn to type, although that was mainly girls, doing something like "office studies". My sister did that and is a lot better than me. And has certificates to prove it.

My father was taught in the Army, on old Teletypewriters. These only have the letter keys, so he used to put his fingers on the "F" and "H" instead of the "F" and "J" which are marked on modern keyboards. Our little fingers rest on the ";" key - which of course, didn't exist then.

My mother learned from a second-hand typing course that one of her friends lent her. I've no idea why she wanted to (boredom, perhaps?), but I had a typewriter as a child, and loved to type things, so I went through it as well. It was a bit more difficult on a typewriter, since you had to not only hit the keys harder, but also to hit them with a consistent pressure.

This was all in the good old days when offices looked like this:


Nowadays, they're completely different:


Plus ca change... (If I'd payed more attention in French lessons, I'd know what that means).

The main difference is that in those olden days only typists typed. Everyone else wrote or dictated. Nowadays even the boss types. And yet they're still teaching people to write. Why is that? Wouldn't Helena be better off learning to type instead?

I mean, who writes these days? My handwriting is pretty much illegible, but that's fine since no-one but me has to read it (and I'm not good at this, so I try to avoid it where possible). I remember very well when I was about 14, and my English teacher complained about it. I remember him saying "Maybe one day computers will take over and people won't need to read your writing, but that's not going to happen soon, so you'd better improve."

Ha!

This was in the mid-80s. Ten years later when I started working in an office they were just bringing in computers on everyone's desktops. And retraining all the typists to do other things.

I had this discussion with a colleague. He doesn't think that people should be taught to type. He points out that keyboards are a lot bigger than typewriters, and also you have to keep moving your hand away to use the mouse. I try and use the mouse infrequently. It's evil. It gives you RSI.

I hope Helena follows the family tradition and learns to type (my maternal grandmother was a secretary), as whatever else happens in our rapidly changing world, the keyboard seems to be here to stay.

Oh, and as far as SMS is concerned, maybe they should replace it with morse: