It’s the little things that you notice. I was writing something, and just happened to notice that I was looking off into the distance while I was typing. It was one of those choices I made when I was very young. I was in High School, our school didn’t have a typing class, and I decided I needed to learn how. I don’t even remember why. It might have been my mom’s stories about learning, with those typewriters with no letters on the keys, when she was growing up.

Anyways, I remember taking one course, one of those summer enrichment things, up at Northern Secondary. I seem to recall I also took magic, stained glass, and board games, but those might have been different years. (Come to think of it, it might even have been before high school…) Interestingly, I remember this being my choice, perhaps an odd choice for a 12 year old. I don’t even remember why I thought it would be useful, but I remember acutely that I knew it would be. Perhaps similar to my choice to pursue chemical engineering over computers, as I knew that no matter what I did, I would be using computers.

I remember taking that one course, and it being fun…They had these cool puzzles where they gave you a sequence of commands to type, making simple versions of what I could only find online as ‘typewriter art’: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1250&bih=694&q=typewriter+art

(Kind of early ASCII art, I wonder how much crossed over…)

In searching for the above, I found:

http://www.rapidtyping.com/online-typing-games/isogram-puzzle.html

It’s Mastermind, but with words! 😀

Which apparently has also been published:

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/5662/word-mastermind

In a couple of different forms:
https://boardgamegeek.com/image/1029413/word-mastermind
https://boardgamegeek.com/image/1151419/word-mastermind

Anyways, I took these classes, but I don’t remember really using my typing until we had an email group in undergrad called the ‘Mailstrom’, often hitting 3 digits of messages per day, where quick wit (and quicker typing) was key.

I suspect there was also some training from playing computer games, but that would really only train a few keys (mostly ctrl and alt, from that era), and the mental mapping probably wouldn’t be from the hand motion to the letter.

And right now, I’m touch typing this, and it seems so normal/natural. Such a weird skill. Happy typing! 😀