What happened was Bill Gates left his ordinary keyboard in his car on a hot day and it melted into the shape you know today.
He figured he could sell it and sure enough there were enough people with bent hands that bought it. True story.
I never typed before buying my first personal computer at age forty five, in 1998. I soon found myself typing a lot, for business and for pleasure.
Almost immediately, I realized that my lack of typing skill was going to be a serious impediment to my ability to communicate rapidly with this new medium; so I set about training myself to blind type with all ten fingers.
Took awhile, but even without a standard tutorial, I got very fast at it.
One thing that helped me a lot, was switching from the standard flat keyboard to the slanted ergonomic keyboard made by Microsoft. To this day, it’s the only desktop keyboard I use.
Very often I’m glad that my mom made me take type-writing class back in High School(?) in the 70’s. I bet it was only last week I was thinking about it.
Of course - the fact that she typed all of my papers was surely a factor.
In college we would help people out with several of us typing while some guy was handwriting his paper. We figured out that if each of us took something like 1.5 pages of handwriting it would fit on one page typed. We would all be typing different sections at the same time and then combine the pages!!
That’s interesting. I was watching someone use one of those ergonomic keyboards the other day and wondering how she could type on it.
I learned touch typing decades ago. I do not think I could type using anything other than the regular keyboard. But I suppose if you learned using the ergonomic keyboard, it’s use would be natural to you.
>>One thing that helped me a lot, was switching from the standard flat keyboard to the slanted ergonomic keyboard made by Microsoft. To this day, it’s the only desktop keyboard I use.
I could see a new keyboard layout being designed. We’ll be told that this layout is “improved” but as with so many “better mousetraps” we’ve been sold, it won’t necessarily be better (different isn’t automatically “better”).
And the differences (even subtle, like a fatter Enter key where the backslash key used to be) will hamstring older typers (putting them out to pasture in offices).
Not only would you have to learn a new keyboard layout, you’d have to UNLEARN the old keyboard layout (wired in memory over a lifetime).
Agreed. They take some getting used to, but once you do, you will realize how bad the conventional keyboard really is.
I taught myself how to type in Jr. High. I bought a broken manual typewriter at the flea market for $2 and fixed it. I spent the summer spending 1 hour a day typing from random Funk and Wagnalls Encyclopedia passages. I set a rule that said I could not watch TV until my hour was done.
It served me well. But today, I wish that maybe I should have spent that hour learning how to play the piano. But it would have been harder to get a piano home from the flea market.