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Comment by Retric

10 years ago

The advantage of touch typing is on a good keyboard/desk/etc you can do it 10 hours a day for 30 years without wrecking your hands. That said, most programmers don't actually type that much so it's not nearly as important.

I bemoan the death (or near-extinction) of text-input games. I learned entirely on my own how to touch type by playing classic Sierra adventure games and spending a ton of time in DOS. I never would have done that if I had gotten into computing a few years later with the transition to mouse-based UIs.

  • Definitely same here. I feel I was fortunate that my parents were poor graduate students. As a result, I learned my formative computing skills on DOS 6.2/Windows 3.1 at a time when respectable citizens were packing 486DX4s - Pentium 90s.