Typing Obsession

Folks who know me really well know how obsessed I am with typing. When I was a kid, my parents purchased a typing magic game for our Atari 800 where you needed to type to keep aliens from landing on the earth (or, at least I think that was the premise). I had mandatory typing classes in grade school and middle school. Still, I was a hunt and pecker. Why would I need to type?

A friend of my brother came to visit our family when he was on leave from college, sometime around 1990. He needed to type something up, and we had a Brother word processor while his father had a broken typewriter. I was amazed at the speed at which he typed - putting together reports was such a chore for me, yet he did it effortlessly.

When I got to college I did not have a computer. But my roommate did. He also had a copy of Mavis Beacon teaches typing. While all of my friends were playing early multi-person shooter games, I was learning how to type. I used Mavis obsessively. That was 1994 or so. Periodically I will pick up the newest version of Mavis and play obsessively for a few weeks. I write a lot for work, so I get natural practice.

spiralshell

 was nice enough to post a link to an online typing test. One minute, random common English words. Of course, you'd type faster if the words were in a sentence, so it may underestimate your typing prowess. My high was 75 words per minute. I'll have to go back to Mavis to increase that...

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