Kite Strings

Chad May - 2011/02/10 06:59:19 UTC
Nashville

Re: The Year With No Serious Injuries... Leatt Neck Brace

My passion for this topic eclipses my ability to type... Also I just banged my Dvorak typing finger in the front door of my apartment.

Red Howard - 2017/04/18 01:49:38 UTC

The position of letters on the keyboard may be part of the problem, too.

Jared Diamond - 1997/04/01

QWERTY was devised by Christopher Sholes, who began his typewriter-building experiments in 1867. Sholes's first keyboard used piano keys in a single row, with the letters in alphabetical order. But he was soon forced to change that arrangement, because his type bars responded sluggishly. When he struck one key soon after another, the second key's type bar jammed the first bar before the first could fall back, and the first letter was printed again. Key jamming was still an occasional problem some 80 years later, when I had chicken pox, but at least by then the type bars struck the paper from the front side, so you could immediately see what was happening and separate the keys with your fingers. Alas, with Sholes's machine and most other typewriters until the early part of the century, the type bars struck the invisible rear side of the paper, and you didn't know the bars had jammed until you pulled out the page and saw that you had typed 26 lines of uninterrupted E's instead of the Gettysburg Address.

To overcome the problem of invisible jamming, Sholes applied antiengineering principles with the goal of slowing down the typist and thus preventing the second bar from jamming the falling first bar. At that time, modern typing speeds were not yet a goal. The idea of eight-finger touch typing was still unknown. Typists rummaged around with one or two fingers while looking at the keyboard, and Sholes was ecstatic if the resulting typing rate reached a measly 20 or 30 words per minute, the rate of writing by hand.

Sholes began to redesign his keyboard by commissioning a study to determine the most common letters or letter combinations in English texts, then he scattered those common letters as widely as possible over the keyboard. For example, the three most common letters (E, T, O) were placed in the top row, the next two most common (A, H) in the home row, and the next most common (N) on the bottom row, causing the common digraph on to require a hurdle from top row to bottom. Remington engineers slightly modified Sholes's almost-QWERTY design by transferring the common consonant R to the upper row, thereby enabling typewriter salesmen to show off their machine to prospective buyers by typing the word typewriter very quickly (all the letters were now in the same row). That final resulting keyboard still betrays its origin as an alphabetical arrangement of piano keys, by the nearly alphabetical sequence fghjkl in the home row, with de just to the left and I just to the right of that sequence.

Chris McKeon - 2018/09/25 03:32:48 UTC

I was going {AFTER IT SO TO SPEAK}. Well I was typing away on this Royal Brand Typewriter that I have begun my efforts to type. I have Goals. I want to be Able to as one of you described as a Smoking Typing Speed. That speed is one hundred twenty one words per minute. I need to ask my Father the if he Typed at the rate of One-Hundred-Twenty-One -Words-Per-Minute. Well did my Father do that speed as far as his Typing was concerned, Did He type that Fast using a Manual Typewriter, or did He do it while typing on an electric?

Some of you must have had experience typing. So please tell me: How Fast is Fast?

I will say that I think that if, and sitting here right now. It really is a case of {IF} I will ever be able to type at a typing Rate of One Hundred twenty One Words per minute. I will not accomplish achieving the Goal of typing one hundred twenty one words per Minute on this Royal {MANUAL TYPEWRITER} This will not be happening.

For me to achieve a Typing rate of One-Hundred twenty One Words Per Minute. I believe that I will need to do that using an electric typewriter will enable me to haver some sort of a chance.

Red Howard - 2018/09/25 04:50:30 UTC

Chris,

If you want to type fast, there are learning programs for the computer that can spot your typing "trouble spots" and they will work with you to increase your speed, as individual, personalized instruction.

This method will be much faster than learning by simple typing practice.

Then you can do those same typing drills on the manual typewriter, to increase your hand strength.

One such program is "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing" and I would guess there are many more "typing-teacher" programs out there.

Forty words per minute is the absolute speed limit of the human brain, running hands on a typewriter. To type any faster than 40 WPM, and many people can do that, (we now believe) your spinal column has "learned" entire words; you do not type R-E-S-P-E-C-T letter by letter then; there is too much length of nerves to send those signals one-by-one from the brain that fast.

The brain (we now believe) sends the entire word RESPECT to the spinal column, which then commands fingers to type that word. If you learn to misspell a word when typing, you will misspell that word often, and it's a tough habit to change. Sixty words per minute is smoking fast, and in the past, secretaries who can type that fast or faster could command higher paychecks. Typing faster than one hundred words per minute would be record-book speeds.

The speed record in typing (Guinness Book of World Records) is about 200 words per minute, but that was done on a Dvorak electric keyboard, not a QUERTY keyboard.

Dvorak keyboards are inside every Windows system...

...but you need to re-label all of the alphabet keys for Dvorak.

QUERTY keyboards were designed to slow down your typing, so the keys of a mechanical typewriter would not get jammed up by fast typing.

If you type too fast on a mechanical typewriter, the keys will all get jammed together at the paper roller.

Bart Weghorst - 2011/02/25 19:06:26 UTC

But I've had it once where the pin had bent inside the barrel from excessive tow force. My weaklink was still intact. The tug pilot's weaklink broke so I had the rope. I had to use two hands to get the pin out of the barrel.
No stress because I was high.

With computers today, QUERTY keyboards are a really dumb idea, but once a typist learns typing on a QUERTY keyboard, it's a real pain to switch to Dvorak.

I use a Dvorak keyboard...

...and nobody at work has ever asked to borrow my computer twice.

hey could not spell DOG on my computer keyboard, without searching for every letter.

One guy looked at my Dvorak keyboard and said it was giving him a headache, so he had to look away.

If you get to playing music on a Yamaha or Casio music keyboard, you can buy them with full-size piano keys, not the tiny "toy" size keys. Those electronic keyboards will not be the full 88 keys across usually, but close enough. The real advantage with music keyboards will be in finding them (or pianos) in businesses and homes, and everybody will be happy to let you play good music there.