Gogarty wrote:

In article om,
says...

On Sep 11, 6:43 pm, Dave wrote:

More utter nonsense. Only a fool would let work product that had been typed
at the rate of 80-100 words per minute go out without proofreading.

even if he
were as skilled as the best of those whose full-time job is transcription.


My mom died last last year at this time. After building Liberty ships
i WW2 and Korea she became a typest. When she retired she was able to
do 120 error free. But then again she also new shorthand. SHe really
liked the computers. It was more difficult to jam em. She routeenly
out typed the IBM Selectricts. She was just too fast for thoes IBM
balls. She said when she was working in the federal building steno
pool there were others who were a lot faster !
Gone with the buggie whips

Bob

Right and the current qwerty keyboard was to keep the old time
typewriter keys from jamming - meant to slow down the typist.

The next advance over the regular manual typewriter - before we got
the Selectric, was an IBM Executive with variable spaced letters. If
you had a correction, you had to remember how many spaces the letters
took. IIRC, most of the letters were 3 spaces, but the I and L were
only two, the M was four and the W was five (in lower case). We were
still using carbon paper then too.

One of my jobs in HS was to do typescript of my dad's first book for
photo-offset printing where we were not allowed to erase an error
because it would show. (Later editions were typeset - only the first
version was done this way)

My mom had one of these typewriters and a Selectric when she died and
I basically threw them away because no one wants one anymore.

I had a secretary once whom I hired straight out of college -- her first job.
She was a typing demon. Information went in her eyes and out her fingers with
no stops in between at some incredible speed. The type script she produced was
a faithful copy of what she was given -- errors and all. She just went on
automatic and if it was garbage in it was garbage out. It took awhile to get
her to slow down and read what she was copying before she typed it. She became
an excellent editor and has been running her own PR and advertising business
for years. But way back then she was a real automaton.

Yes - it is much faster to copy than to write. The two processes
don't have any real correlation. Perfectly possible to type faster
than you can think and reproduce what you see absolutely accurately.
When I was learning to type, there was a girl in my class who was
blind and she was learning to type dictation (since she couldn't read
the text). She had to be perfect because she couldn't see her errors.
It can be done.

Really OT, but my first computer back in '76 was a Trash 80 that had no lower
case. I was doing a major project for a client who objected to receiving
typescripts that were all in upper case, like a teletype. The printer was a
recycled Anderson-Jacobson terminal with an IBM Selectric action with a
keyboard. You could use it offline as a typewriter. It cost $1,200 in 1976..
The printer would print out the teletype text and then my wife would retype it
properly on the same machine. Happily, after-market vendors started producing
chips that would give the Trash 80 lower case capability.

My first computer was the Apple II+ in about that time frame and it
didn't have the caps either. Although you could get software that
would put them in.