General Discussion & Chat: Did you learn typewriting the "a-s-d-f..." way?, 1 by Dinu

Dinu wrote:
These days, knowledge and fluency in typing has become a necessity. There are typewriting institutes here teaching the art. They also have 'shorthand'. I atttended the typing classes in 1973-74. Those days, they had old hard-key Remingtons, Haldas. I was given a junk machine (as to all beginners) to type on. It was so hard that errors were common and the fingers got aches. I requested for change to a better machine which they did not entertain. So gradually the interest waned and so one day I decided I would not go further on. But by then, I had acquired the knowledge of the keyboard though speed was slow and with errors. I had a dream of possessing a typewriter at home, for which I had to wait till 1994. It so happened that my office boss was moving out after leaving the job. So he had an old portable "Portugal" typewriter that he did not need. It was a good bargain when I bought it. I was using this to write letters to my penfriends, write short letters to the papers and so on. Just about that time, computers were making their slow and sure entry into offices where we were amused to see dotmatrix printers, daisywheel printers and later ink-jet and laser printers stunned us with their speed!

The first machine I saw was in my grandfather's (lawyer) office - it was a "Royal". When he took us little boys (me and brother) there when there was some shopping to be done at the market, we never missed the opportunity as we wanted to hit the round keys and see the typewritten letters 'clack, clack' on the paper. We were amused to see our spelled names 'in print'!

Computer keyboards have made the jobs much easier. Ask my wife who is a qualified typist/steno. She has seen the hard days of the manual machines when a heavy work load was a common phenomenon with tens of pages to be typed out in a day.

The machine with which I learnt was something like this.