It’s funny how decisions you may make in the moment can affect the course of your life.
It was the fall of 1984 and I was signing up for classes for my last semester at my high school in southern Connecticut. I had one open course slot and I had to sign up for some class. I’d completed all my required courses and could sign up for any course I wanted.
So after some deliberation, I signed up for “typing”. This made sense in my brain since I’d been playing with computers since 1977 when the first Apple II came out and one of my best friends got one. Later I got my own Commodore 64, and at the high school I helped out in the computer labs that were full of Apple IIe’s.
It seemed to me that typing might be something to learn. 🤔
BUT… this was 1984/1985 in a US high school. The only people who took “typing classes” were the girls who were expecting to become secretaries. 🤯 Looking back, it’s kind of fascinating now, but there was this clear gender divide. Typing was NOT a class that boys normally took at my school.
So there I was… in a room full of desks with IBM Selectric typewriters on them. The only boy. Me and 20+ girls sitting there typing jjjjjjjjjjjjj and fffffffff a zillion times until we could finally work our way up to such phrases as “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” and go on from there. Typing and typing and typing for the five months or so of the semester. Typing so much that we could “touch type” and be able to be looking at something completely different while typing on our typewriters. Doing speed tests and accuracy tests and more.
In the perfect clarity of hindsight, it turned out to be one of the smartest things I ever did!
I would go on to the University of New Hampshire where I got involved in the early Internet, as well as earlier networks like BITNET, EcoNet, etc. I would write millions of email messages, thousands and thousands of blog posts, a number of books, many reports and documents… and many, many lines of programming code in so many different languages.
I would go on to teach electronic publishing using Framemaker… and then develop courseware… and help people create web pages using HTML. Several of my jobs involved writing extensive sets of documentation, or later rapidly developing draft documents for Internet standards.
Because of that typing class, I was well-prepared for the USENET flamewars… for long debates on email lists… for being able to just spew out blog posts, press releases, speeches, or whatever else was needed.
Typing has been a critical component of the success I’ve had over the past 40 years… it turned out to be perhaps the single most useful class I took in high school!
And I almost didn’t… it was just tossed in at the last minute because I needed to fill a slot! 🤣
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons – History Trust of South Australia, circa 1945 – not my actual school.. I’m not THAT old! 😃