How Did You Learn To Type?

I was typing when I was 4 years old, my dad was a computer/software engineer so he had a few computers around the house. I simply sat at a computer (no OS) and typed peoples names in green or yellow text into the black screen. (For reference, I am currently 19).

As time went on, I then learned to touch-type thanks to Microsoft Messenger.

Definately self-taught here, from about age 8. One peculiarity of being self-taught is that I don’t use the home keys (nor did I know what the bumps on them were for until last year), and that I type with only my index finger and thumb of my right hand – I use all fingers on the left, however. Somehow I can type 80wpm with 7 fingers, so I’m not complaining.

I had taken a few typing classes in grade school where I learned the keyboard layout, but I never took it seriously enough to improve my typing speed. However, around 1993/1994 we got our first PC in our house and hooked it up with some Earthlink dialup. What I really wanted to do was chat with other people like I had seen with my friends’ AOL accounts. At the time, AOL instant messenger hadn’t been released yet and I wasn’t aware of many other mass-appeal chat environments. I found wbs.net and was impressed with all the different chat hubs and the amount of people online, but there was no ‘push’ functionality at the time. I would read the discussion in a room and slowly type my response, hit send, reload my page, and would have lines of new conversation show up that I would have to catch up on. In order to even catch up with the conversation I would have to force myself to type faster so I can reload the page/chat history sooner. And that’s how I learned to improve my typing speed.

Got a job taking orders over the phone and inputing them into a computer. Lets just say people don’t like to wait for you to peck around and find the keys. So within a few weeks I was typing pretty fast, and learning to spell crazy names without even thinking about it.

Never did, I even switched to dvorak to since I dont have qurty ingrained into my head, (boy it’s hard to spell quarty with out it being on the top row now :P )

ARrrg! still got it wrong..

On that I still hope to learn to type without looking at the keyboard

Just from hours and hours on the satan box as a kid. But seriously though, this new Apple keyboard is great.

I started playing a MUD — text based, online D&D game, like World of Warcraft without pretty graphics — when I was about 12 or 13 (1993/1994) and you could perform better in the game if you were a fast and accurate typist. Within a year or two I could type 60wpm.

i started typing on a sinclair spectrum´s rubber keys.
graduated to an amazing ibm pc jr keyboard, back in the days when keys were made of some sort of metal, they clicked nicely (still miss them) but were rather noisy.

after that i had to go to the military and ended up on comms. we had typing classes, where we should learn to use all our fingers. by that time i was already doing that, minus the little finger, and i could never get the hang of it.

nowadays i prefer my powerbook g4 keys, and really hate ‘regular’ keyboards…
and i’m still typing away with the same fingers.

I had a computer class in my elementary school where we learned to type and run programs(like paint and such). I progressed my typing on my own, by typing papers and writing in forums and such, I don’t understand why people are so amazed by the fact that I can type and not be looking at the keys.

MSN!!! and from work having to type what is being dictated to me!

Typing was one of those things that was a really slow development for me. We had a computer, but at a young age I just used it for games and stuff. But during the summer, my mom would require me to do the “Mavis Beacon Typing Tutor 5″ for at least 30 minutes a day. And for 3 summers in a row. I hated it. So basically I got up to the point where I could type fast while looking at the keys. Then we got a new computer and internet to boot, and my typing skill shot up because of heightened computer use. Now I don’t need to look look at keys.

In short, I learned to type because I hate Mavis Beacon.

Mavis Beacon for about a month, then self taught with aim :-)

The Philipines hasn’t caught up yet with computers back in the 90′s, so yep, the typewriter. Started punching those buttons when I was in 5th grade (back in journalism training).

I was lucky enough to have a friend who had parents that were computer teachers at the high school. So when i was somewhere around ten years old i was taking the advanced computer corses for the high school kids during the summer for fun. Then actually took that same class again when i was actually in high school about ten years later. Computers change, but still had the same teacher.