Textual Typing

Six months ago, my laptop's hard drive decided it was time to stop working. Instead of buying a replacement hard drive, or a new computer, or even a laptop, I decided to do nothing. I used my Smartphone to do my writing, which, to be honest, eventually and frustratingly dwindled down to damned near non-existent.

At first, writing with the phone was fine as long as I kept the issues simple and without too many citations or references. In this vein, the phone was an easy method of writing down thoughts and ideas, but over time, and as I began to need to do more complicated and complex pieces, the phone became troublesome for me for a variety of reasons. The phone is too small. The ability to flip between browser windows is manually cumbersome. Copying and pasting became a tedious nightmare, especially when I wanted to copy and paste certain quotes or references or so on. But if I'm to be frank and honest, the real problem with the phone was that it had no big QWERTY keyboard for my fingers to type on.

To put this in perspective, I've been typing on keyboards since I was six years old. At my mom's automotive repair and customization shop back in Albuquerque in the mid 1970s, a Radio Shack TRS 80 was installed in a small nondescript office. It was there that my mom introduced me to my first computer, and more importantly, my first keyboard. As the TRS 80's cursor blinked against an ugly green screen, my mom encouraged me to type on the bulky keyboard. I did and became instantly hooked on both the keyboard and computer.

In middle school a few years later, I took a Typing I class that I aced. Actual typewriters were used. My teacher often allowed me to help my classmates understand how the QWERTY typing worked, how to not look at the typewriter while typing, and so on. It's hard to imagine that today, typing classes seem to be an unheard of thing in schools across the country. I could be wrong, though. And then there was the TTY and TDDs I used to communicate with my mom and friends in college. TTYs and TDDs are telephone devices for deaf and hard of hearing folks, and in the old days, they acted very much like modem-to-modem electronic typewriters with QWERTY keyboards.

By the time I took a speed typing test for a job in Arizona in my early 20s, I was spitting out more than 125 words a minute with few mistakes. Twenty years later, I was comfortably pounding out roughly 90 words a minute without much thought. By the time my laptop quit last October, typing was as natural to me as breathing.

So, when Tina got me a new Samsung Tablet earlier this week, I was a bit excited. The new generation of tablets feature touch screens and stylus pens, as well as keyboards that connect magnetically to the tab. It is amazing to me to sit here and type on a keyboard that's attached to what's really an oversized and glorified Smartphone. But that matters little to me: the important thing is I'm typing again, and I feel so liberated and free. So much to say. So much to type.

Curiously, in the time I didn't use a QWERTY keyboard, I noticed how young people today can furiously thumb text messages and emails, if not more, using their Smartphones. I'm impressed. I still have to slowly type words when I send text messages on my phone. And after doing some research, I discovered some differences with typing, the history of the QWERTY keyboard, as well as attempts at improving on that design, including the KALQ keyboard. All fascinating stuff.

Yesterday, after we got home with a new keyboard for the tablet, I was so excited that I wrote my mom an email and told her about the six months without a laptop. She wrote me back last night and said my grandfather had once served in a State Department job in Philadelphia managing a large pool of typists. Fabulous! This means to me that typing is in my DNA, and I'm happy about it, and happy to be typing again.

And also: I earnestly tried writing using pen and paper but that didn't really work. About half the time, I ended up on my Smartphone, and about half the time writing oodles of doodles. UGH.

That's perfectly good for me because I'm happily back typing again.