qwerty

[nice90sguy]

Just wondering how many of you can actually touch-type, like, properly?
Two-finger (and occasional thumb) typist here.

A prize of a 1967 portable Olivetti typewriter to whoever can tell me the longest word you can type using only the top row a QWERTY keyboard

 

[SimonDoom]

I can. I have to look occasionally to get the numbers and symbols right but I use both hands with the letters and can do it without looking easily. If it wasn't for mistakes I'd probably be around 70 words per minute. I haven't tested myself lately.

Is the answer "typewriter"?

 

[StillStunned]

I get as far as "quieter". I'm sure there are longer ones though.

 

[mildlyaroused]

Oh boy.

When I was in school my typing was like my superpower. I've never learnt the proper fingering for touch-typing (my pinkies just kinda float randomly while I type), but I've always written so much since I was young that I've developed my own method, and never look down at the keyboard.

I can maintain upwards of 150 words per minute with punctuation, pretty much forever. Of course I'll never write that fast when I'm writing fiction - only if I'm transcribing something.

 

[Lifestyle66]

Back in ancient times, I passed (barely) my typing class in high school, and I could use all ten fingers and thumbs on the keyboard. Then I never again used that skill.

I HATED using white-out. I need to see the right letters typed when I touch the keys, and touch-typing led to too many mistakes with the occasional slip hitting an adjacent key on an electric typewriter. So, I now use two fingers.

 

[Bamagan]

I'm in a similar boat as @mildlyaroused insofar as I touch-type most of the time, but not using my full complement of fingers. My pinkies also serve no purpose, or very rarely, in my typing style, aside from getting sore from hovering aimlessly. (Edit: But I'm in a kayak compared to a motorboat, as I'm certainly nowhere near 150 wpm under any circumstances.)
I think perpetuity ties typewriter for number of letters. And repertoire, if you'll pardon my French.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

Proterotype or rupturewort are longer. Americans may accept teetertotter without a hyphen...

I use most of my fingers but need my thumb to rest below the space bar to confirm where everything else is, so on average I'm a 8-fingered typist. I can't actually reach all the keys in the standard position as I have small hands - which does mean I can type with two thumbs on a phone just about as quickly.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I tested myself once on a keyboard decades ago, at 90 wpm, 98% accuracy, with a six finger technique. But I could never break my learned muscle memory to learn how to touch type properly.

Nearly all of my stuff here has been one finger hunt and peck on a kindle screen with auto-predict that's mostly helpful, but sometimes annoying.

My day job writing is much faster, but it's contracts/project management stuff I been doing for decades, and it's easy to blah blah blah bullshit blurt. I go into automatic, coz it's all Project Management 101 stuff.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Just wondering how many of you can actually touch-type, like, properly?

Yep. My parents encouraged me to learn as a kid, and it's been a very useful skill. Typed this paragraph with my eyes closed, how did I do?

My typing speed was pretty good when I was younger, probably slowed a little now, but the limit is usually how fast I can think of words that need typing.

A prize of a 1967 portable Olivetti typewriter to whoever can tell me the longest word you can type using only the top row a QWERTY keyboard

@Kumquatqueen beat me to the longest. I'd probably pick "rupturewort" as the longest one that doesn't need an "if you pick just the right dictionary" qualifier; "proprietory" (variant of "proprietary") is another 11-letter one but not widely recognised. There are several ten-letter ones including "proprietor".

 

[Bamagan]

Prototerritory is fourteen letters, although it might be a bit of a cheat since it is (at best) an obscure neologism. Still, its construction and roots are basic enough that if one encountered it in the wild most people would probably get a similar idea about what it means.

 

[nice90sguy]

My father who was a writer, used the same typewriter for decades. I could determine the letter-frequencies of English by looking at his keyboard -- the keys for the vowels, and common letters and common punctuation were all shiny, while the obscure ones were covered with gunk. Symbol keys (which I use daily), were so caked in gunk you coudln't even tell what they were. The gunk was layers of cigarette smoke deposit. Like a lot of writers back in the day, he smoked the whole time while writing.

 

[Handley_Page]

I got as far as : " typewriter"
THEN i HAD TO STOP.

 

[alohadave]

I ended up taking two semesters of typing in high school using IBM Selectrics. I learned to touch type, but never got faster than 25 WPM.

The speed was never an issue for me, though it didn't help my grades.

 

[Trionyx]

The story of QWERTY is interesting. The original typewriters had keyboards with the most common letters in the main row, lesser common above and least common below. Typists became so skilled and went so fast that they jammed the old manual key levers. The keyboard was redesigned to slow them down and now we are stuck with it.

It would be easy to design computers to allow either QWERTY or a more efficient and faster keyboard and let the user choose between them. Within a generation QWERTY would be in the trash heap of history but there are simply too many people who are not interested in improving things.

Similarly, in the US people don’t want to put in the effort to convert to a vastly easier system of measurements. We learn new skills every day but no one is going to take away my ‘God knows how many fluid ounces are in a gallon’ system, dammit.

 

[joy_of_cooking]

no one is going to take away my ‘God knows how many fluid ounces are in a gallon’ system, dammit.

Apparently there are places (I've heard both Canada and the UK claimed for this) where they've gone metric but still sell things in packages of 450g...

 

[nice90sguy]

Milk still comes in 568g (i.e. pint) cartons in the UK

 

[StillStunned]

With shrinkflation, most products come in strange, unrounded volumes, even countries that have been metric forever.

 

[enbiji]

Just wondering how many of you can actually touch-type, like, properly?
Two-finger (and occasional thumb) typist here.

A prize of a 1967 portable Olivetti typewriter to whoever can tell me the longest word you can type using only the top row a QWERTY keyboard

I used to be able to touch properly, and pretty well. Fast and accurate. But the skill has atrophied a bit because I do everything on my phone now. So now I type witha single extended middle finger...which helps with my driving.

 

[enbiji]

The story of QWERTY is interesting. The original typewriters had keyboards with the most common letters in the main row, lesser common above and least common below. Typists became so skilled and went so fast that they jammed the old manual key levers. The keyboard was redesigned to slow them down and now we are stuck with it.

It would be easy to design computers to allow either QWERTY or a more efficient and faster keyboard and let the user choose between them. Within a generation QWERTY would be in the trash heap of history but there are simply too many people who are not interested in improving things.

Similarly, in the US people don’t want to put in the effort to convert to a vastly easier system of measurements. We learn new skills every day but no one is going to take away my ‘God knows how many fluid ounces are in a gallon’ system, dammit.

Here in the USA, Literotica goes by the name GallonRotica.

 

[enbiji]

Milk still comes in 568g (i.e. pint) cartons in the UK

My milkshake brings all the boys to the Meter.

 

[StillStunned]

My milkshake brings all the boys to the Meter.

* Metre

 

[enbiji]

My milkshake brings all the boys to the Meter.

I really got my puzay kilo'd last nightc

 

[nice90sguy]

My milkshake brings all the boys to the Meter.

Stop metricating our imperial threads

 

[enbiji]

* Metre

Told you my typing skills had atrophied

 

[enbiji]

Stop metricating our imperial threads

Metribating?