Slower With Age

I started typing in the fourth grade, approximately age nine. I began early because my father was teaching a typing class in the high school in which he taught.

I remember with great pride an early typing test. I remember achieving 72 words per minute on an IBM Selectric with one error. I felt so proud pounding away at that keyboard. I remember wanting to be a court stenographer because of my immeasurable typing skills. About the same time I wanted to work in Alaska too. I wanted to be a court stenographer in Alaska. Just think of the possibilities!

I still have no idea what typing 72WPM on an IBM Selectric has to do with typing on a keypad that looks like that of a court stenography machine , mainly because a court stenographer's keypad looks like this:

That was more than thirty years ago and just now I took another typing test on this web site See How Fast You Can Type. I achieved 71.17 words per minute (322.86 characters per minute) with 3 errors and a hyper four-year-old clamoring about my side. On a QWERTY keyboard as well. I'm definately slower with age.

Dvorak layouts

The other day, I saw the guy that sits in the office next to me taking all the keys off his keyboard and putting them back in a seemingly random order. I said "what are you doing?". He indicated that he was switching to an alternative keyboard layout, a Dvorak keyboard, because "it is more efficient". It goes without saying that he was an engineer.

Dr. August Dvorak was an educational psychologist and professor of education. He and his brother-in-law, Dr. William Dealey, are best known for creating the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard layout in the 1930s as a replacement for the QWERTY keyboard layout. They designed the new layout as an efficient layout for those one-handed typists. Shown below is a two-handed Dvorak keyboard. They also come in left-handed and right-handed varieties.

Typing Facts

• On average, a typist’s left hand does 56% of the typing. I guess the left-handed Dvorak keyboard must be über efficient.
  
  
• The words ‘’stewardesses'’ and ‘’reverberated'’ are the longest words (12 letters) typed with only the left hand.
  
  
• The longest words that can be typed using only the right hand in proper typing form are ‘’lollipop” and “monopoly”.
  
  
• On a QWERTY keyboard, the only ten letter word that you can spell with the top row of letters is “typewriter”. On a two-handed Dvorak keyboard, they only word you can spell is "PYFCRLG".
  
  
  
• Skepticisms is the longest word that alternates hands when typing.