Seriously thoughtful Show the first device you learned typing on!

[Martinoptic]

I had an Olivetti Dora in the early seventies.

[Hemmi]

I often tell people how typing class was the most useful class I took back in High School

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Terisa de morgan

But that's how those programmers that typed the whole C program in 3 lines...

I used to enjoy looking at the obfuscated C contest entries. I think it's returned this year.

[Quoth]

An old typewriter in the BBC. Weekly report.
It looked like it could have been bought S/H when BBC created. Huge tall black mechanical.

My school taught rugby, cricket, Latin and bullying.

[acanthicus]

I very rarely used mechanical typewriters before learning to type with 10 fingers. I think I learned it on the very first Microsoft natural keyboard. I still have it and use it every day at work. Most of the characters vanished over time, so it is a challenge to find the correct keys when not using 10 finger system.

Wikipedia, DeanW77 (cutout):

[rjwse@aol.com]

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.

[Moonbase59]

Now that was an interesting insight into the world of stenotyping, thanks for that! (I would never be able to learn that… real impressive)

[Quoth]

There was also the chorded Microwriter in 1980s. A stenographer's keyboard seems to be the only chorded keyboard system to survive. There have been many, inc one in the 1968 Mother of All Demos.