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My parents were kind enough to buy me a used Underwood portable with a wooden case. I lugged it around with a handle and used it through college. Once, in the Sixties I took it in to get the ribbon replaced at a typewriter store and they also dipped it in a solvent bath to clean the build-up of gunk out of the o's and e's and so forth. The owner was very enthusiastic and said some day there was going to be an electronic ("not electric") typewriter, but no one knew yet what form it would take. He did not anticipate that it would be an application that ran in a general-purpose desktop computer. I wrote one of the owner's manuals for the word processor for the Texas Instruments TI994a home computer program; it was on a cartridge. No Alt or function keys, just a single Ctrl with Enter. Today I am migrating to a different keyboard, a WSI (Ward Stone Ireland) 22 key stenotype Asterisk keyboard using the Plover app. You can use Plover as an app, preferably with NKRO (N K Roll Over) keyboard that you already have. If you do not have NKRO you can arpeggiate each chord stroke by hitting Space. The Asterisk has 22 keys and costs fifty bucks. It can download "Javelin" into itself so you do not have to have open the Plover app. In this manner you can type on anything, perhaps your phone. A stenotypist job requires 225wpm. There's a contest guy in Houston who hit 360wpm. Within a month or so of practice you can easily exceed 100wpm.
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