Rick's b.log - entry 2026/03/03

On typing

Before answering any question regarding my typing skills, it is worth taking a moment to consider what a typewriter actually was - and how improbably long it dominated the landscape.

The earliest commercially successful typewriters of the late nineteenth century looked less like office equipment and more like dental apparatus designed by a Gothic novelist. A hulking mass of levers and linkages and mechanical optimism that would tear flesh if you misjudged. They were expensive, temperamental, and somewhat alarming. You needed to work out to be able to handle one for more than a few minutes. And yet they did something revolutionary: they separated handwriting from authorship.

For nearly a hundred years after that, surprisingly little changed.

Mechanisms improved. Typebars became more reliable. Layout standardised. Somebody thought to put most of the mechanism into a nice friendly-looking case. By the '60s and '70s we arrived at the canonical office typewriter - unexpectedly heavy, rectangular, satisfyingly clanky. A set of white keys, with a semicircle behind for all the letters. This will be the machine that most people picture when they hear the word "typewriter". Steel frame. Inky ribbon. Each letter a small act of percussive force, and a carriage that jumped around like a caffeinated child because the Shift key meant "Shift" in the most pleasingly literal sense.

It is difficult to overstate what these machines did socially.

The typewriter opened a vast new category of clerical work, and with it, employment for women on a scale previously unseen in office environments, and arguably unseen full stop. Typing pools became an important part of twentieth-century business. For many women, the typewriter was not just a machine they used but a doorway to economic participation. It professionalised female literacy. Entire businesses reorganised around typing, learning to type, and secretarial skills. The modern office and companies, with their secretaries and all the requisite bureaucratic happenings, would be unthinkable without the typewriter.

And yet, mechanically speaking, the core idea barely shifted for decades: a physical glyph smacking into paper, with an inky ribbon in between.

Even electrification in the 1970s and 80s, motors assisting the keystroke for smoother action and less finger fatigue, did not fundamentally alter the model. Letters still crashed into the page one at a time. You could underline, by backing up and pressing the underscore key over what has already been written. You could even make text bold, with varying degrees of effectiveness, usually by holding the Space bar down (to advance the platen and hold it in place), and then just press the desired letter a number of times, tedious but doable.
Then came refinements: daisy wheels replacing individual typebars, yielding crisp, uniform characters. Perhaps most elegant of all, the shift from messy fabric ribbons to carbon film tapes where powdered ink transferred cleanly for sharp, consistent output. Some typewriters even had special correction tapes where the machine could back up and hammer the errant letter into oblivion as if nothing had happened. No more messing around with Tippex or resigning yourself to having to start the page all over again.

That, right there, that was the pinnacle of mechanical typing. However, for all the polish and casing and motor assistance, the essential act remained the same: a shaped letter striking paper through ink.

And then it was obliterated.

Because while the typewriter had evolved gradually for nearly a century, the 1980s compressed change into a handful of years. Laser printers, most famously the HP LaserJet II and its legion of compatible imitators, began appearing at prices that, while not trivial, were suddenly plausible. Especially in an office where it could be budgeted as a business expense.
This was the moment the typewriter lost the war, as the laser printer could do more, do it faster, and for most eyes it looked every bit as professional.
No ribbons. No striking metal. No alignment issues. Multiple fonts. Graphics. Page layout. Identical output every time. And it connected to a computer that could revise endlessly before committing anything to paper.

After nearly a century of incremental refinement, the typewriter did not lose a fair fight. It was simply bypassed.

So, yes, I was asked whether I learned to type on a typewriter.

The short answer is yes.
The longer answer is that the question accidentally straddles one of the most abrupt technological revolutions that "writing" has ever experienced.

I taught myself to type. Two fingers at first, tapping an old typewriter of my mother's like the thing would fight back. Then more fingers joined in as confidence grew. The real challenge wasn't finding the keys. It was slowing my thinking down to match my typing speed.

Thought is high bandwidth. Typing is not. If thought is like fibre and typing is like ADSL, then early hesitant typing is like dial-up.

If you are neurotypical, that mismatch is mildly annoying. If, like me, you are neurodivergent, the mismatch is quite problematic. When the hands lag, boredom seeps in. And boredom is not empty, it is catalytic. The brain wanders off. It redesigns the room. It begins an entirely separate project. It wonders how the laser printer actually draws the page it is outputting. It forgets the sentence halfway through writing it.

Flow, once lost, is gone. It doesn't linger.

Carbon paper still existed when I was young. Just. A thin, inky accomplice that ensured every mistake achieved immortality in duplicate. Carbon copies were not for people who iterate. They were for people who commit to every letter - there's no choice as every error required retyping.

And then, astonishingly quickly, everything changed.

In 1982 we were using View, EdWord, or WordWise and dot matrix printers. A dot matrix printer does not so much print as assault the paper with industrial enthusiasm and unhealthy amounts of noise. Pages emerged attached one after the other and perforated at the edges, faintly trembling in fear. The printed text had a certain distinctive look of general crappiness, but it did hint at better things to come.

And come they did. By 1990 we were producing small magazines with Ovation or Impression and a LaserJet.

Read that again.

In less than a decade we went from impact heads and tractor feed to full page composition on a domestic computer. Layout. Fonts. Columns. Kerning. Justification. Embedded graphics. Output that, unless you pressed your nose to it and squinted, looked professional.

Previously, entire industries had existed to put ideas on paper. People with typesetting equipment and wax rollers and mysterious machines that cost more than a house. If you wanted kerning, you did not do it in your bedroom. You paid someone with highly specialised training.

And then, abruptly, you could do that. All of it. And use all the fonts at the same time (no, please don't).

This was not an upgrade, it was an extinction event. Ordinary people were doing desktop publishing. Not typing letters. Publishing. Magazines. Newsletters. The tools of production slid off industrial floors, miniaturised, and sat on desks next to a mug of tea.
That was not an upgrade. That was an entire phase transition.

The typewriter was a mechanical instrument. Even the later fancy ones with one-line buffer and rudimentary editing features were still, at their heart, mechanical devices.
The word processor, however, was an interface. And the interface did something extraordinary: it made writing reversible.

Reversibility changes cognition.

If every mistake requires retyping a page, the brain composes conservatively and types carefully. It edits before it experiments. Mechanical friction shapes thought, and deadlines hone it.

Introduce a Delete key and you can experience a little more freedom in what you write. But introduce a Delete key that can remove entire paragraphs, plus the ability to cut and paste chunks of text to help it flow better...well then the page becomes provisional. You can draft recklessly. Throw ideas onto the page and revise until you are happy. You can shift paragraphs and change your mind mid-flow without condemning someone to have to start again from the top of the page. For a brain that prefers exploration before refinement, this is not convenience. It is liberation.

After using mom's old typewriter, I got to type on a BBC Micro with its pleasingly chunky keys that felt like real keys. Using EdWord, it was like a revolution compared to the typewriter. I didn't have to commit everything to slightly smudged and not entirely lined up inky words. I could revise, edit, change, and better yet I didn't need to remember that the lower case L also doubled as the number 1; ditto the letter O and the number zero. Or comma, backspace, full stop for an exclamation mark.

And then came the graphical user interface.

Some years later I was subjected to a typing test that masqueraded as Microsoft Word. It was not Word. It was a lookee-likee version in which formatting required the mouse. To make text bold, I was expected to remove a hand from the keyboard, wobble the pointer to see where it had ended up, then nudge it over to a small pictogram of a B, and then click it.

This, I was told, was the proper way.

Now, when I am writing, both hands are on the keyboard. Language is flowing. Working memory is juggling structure, tone, and the faint suspicion that maybe the previous paragraph is a little too pretentious and should be trimmed or at least restrain some of the loquaciousness.
In such a state, attention is delicately stacked like a pile of dishes with cutlery in between.

Reaching for the mouse is not a small action. It is a context switch.

Cognitive psychology calls this the task switching cost. Each switch drains mental resources. For many people, the cost is tolerable. For an ADHD brain, it is perilous. The moment attention disengages, it may not return. The sentence dissolves. The brain takes the opportunity to begin a fascinating internal lecture about seahorses.
If my mind had a little HDD activity light, it would glow solid while swapping from typing to mousing. Occasionally, it would simply fail to swap back.

Keyboard shortcuts are not about shaving milliseconds. They are about preserving cognitive continuity. ^B is inline. It does not eject half-formed clauses from working memory while you go hunting for the right set of pixels. It respects the creative process.

The recruiter, to her credit, allowed me to demonstrate on a real copy of Word. I rapidly completed the test using shortcuts. I may have suggested that forcing a typist to have to click toolbar icons in the middle of typing is akin to asking a concert pianist to pause and press a large flashing button labelled "Loud" for the dramatic part of the performance. For some reason I couldn't possibly fathom, I did not hear from her again.

As to my typing, well after the BBC Micro and into the GUI world, it has pretty much been various sorts of membrane keyboards, all of which have been functional but they suck massively. They're popular because they are mechanically simple and thus dirt cheap.

What fascinates me now is how quickly the knowledge of mechanical offices simply evaporated. For a brief sliver of time, we straddled two worlds. The world of clanking metal glyphs impacting paper, carbon copies, and irreversible keystrokes, and the world of digital layout, laser printers, and infinite undo. These are the worlds in which I learned to type.
We witnessed the tools of professional printing fall into the domestic realm in under a decade. And when this happened, the old ways simply disappeared. Keyboards and screens replaced typewriters.

So, if you ever want to know when someone learned to type, do not ask them about carbon copies.
Just ask them how they make text bold.

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John, 3rd March 2026, 20:27

I well remember buying my first dot matrix printer. It coincidede with my first (and last) visit to a "McDonalds". This was provoked by being accompanied by my wife and then young daughter.Should we hazard perhaps 1990?    The meal (IMHO) tasted of the cardboard it arrived in! Not a patch on Wimpy! But the printer was magic!    I devised a sequence to print out manuscript paper, and a system for printing out the transport arrangements for the special school I was working in at the time!

John, 3rd March 2026, 20:43

Si je me souviens bien, pica was 12pt, whereas the norm then was elite at 10pt.    Rick, I wish you'd allow WhatsApp formatting to allow the underscore to signify "italics" for foreign language quotes! It wouldn't be difficult, I'm sure!

Rob, 3rd March 2026, 21:13

I think my first experience on a keyboard was a TRS-80 at school. Or maybe "playing" with mum's typewriter. I did use that to transcribe some of the programs I was writing, by then on a zx80/zx81. I had the zx printer for a bit. That was impressive in its own way, how minimal it was and still worked. Then had a little pen plotter, before ending up with a dot matrix printer on my by-then BBC Micro. That was the point I was using it to write, and print, letters. Somewhere around 1990 had an interview, and typing test, at an agency. My typing speed was reasonable, worriedly as I was totally self taught, and had no idea about fiber positive, etc.   I don't think I got a laser until the late 90s, and that will have been rescuing a redundant one from scrap at work. Total game changer when it came to printing anything other than text.

Rob, 3rd March 2026, 21:15

Sigh. Bloody autocorrupt. s/fiber positive/finger positions/

David Pilling, 3rd March 2026, 23:35

Some visions of typing...    About 5 years old, I asked for a typewriter, that was around 1960 so very ahead of the time. What I got was "THE Mettype Junior TOY Typewriter" - still capable I suppose. I couldn't read nor write at the time. It has a ring to select what you're going to type. Google the name.    The night where you got to go around sec. mod. to see if you want to go there. A room full of girls all typing in time to music, with the bells on the type writers ringing in unison.    My first electric typewriter Smith Corona SMC. Manual typewriters have to be struck. Electric is so much easier. I suspect the gubbins is something spinning, press the key and the spinning thing whacks the usual mechanism in to the paper. It came with a typing course on cassette so I sat there finding the "home row" and all that.    Motivation was doing post grad work, papers and theses had to be produced. Took me weeks to type out my thesis, oh whether to retype a page, or paint on typex. Departmental secretaries wielded power through their IBM Selectric Golf ball typewriters. Doing papers for their boss - "camera ready copy", or theses for students for which they had to be paid. The point here is that the boss could not type and was hostage to those who could including those who could type into computers.

David Pilling, 3rd March 2026, 23:43

"In a recent comment, I was asked about how I learned to type."    I was actually replying to the comment before the one above from Rick. John saying he could type - me pointing out that how you learn dates you. Multiple fingers on phone keypad is debatable - need to learn two thumbs.

David Pilling, 4th March 2026, 01:16

"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" is a famous English pangram—a sentence containing every letter of the alphabet—used to test typing speed, accuracy, and keyboard function. It is commonly used in 60-second, high-accuracy typing tests to measure words per minute (WPM).

David Pilling, 4th March 2026, 01:34

There is an online test with the quick brown fox etc. I find I can type at 50 wpm.

jgh, 6th March 2026, 00:46

The bane of my life is being forced to type on skinny laptop keyboards. In my last office job I actually took a proper Lenovo beat-somebody-about-the-head keyboard into work and plugged it in. I *NEED* tactile feedback with the keys actually moving under my fingers.    You can get some very good clanky keyboards with membrane mechanisms, but you have to search for them and clasp them close to your chest when you find them. I'm typing this on an old Mistumi white PS2 keyboard where four keycaps have worn off, and the left shift key actually has a hole in it. People ask me why I "put up" with it, they don't understand, replacing it with some modern crap would be "putting up".

jgh, 6th March 2026, 00:52

I *think* this is the typewriter I learned in, aged 8, in 1978. Three rows, caps shift *and* number shift! Except mine was blue. :)  https://www.selency.co.uk/p/2DDGZ65Y/vintage-petite-internatio nal-deluxe-typewriter  One of the first things I typed up was a Dr Who episode list. I remember I lost my school French textbook because I'd put it in the keyboard carrycase and forgotten.    I progressed to a hernia-inducing Remington International in 1981.

jgh, 6th March 2026, 01:01

How do you make bold?  putch(c); putch(8); putch(c);    and watch the printer try to walk off the desk. ;)

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