Re: Socialism is so gay.

In article <MPG.2873ac164d36e63b9897ee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Mark Borgerson <mborgerson@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In article <marek1965-717DE9.00165520062011@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
marek1965@xxxxxxxxxxx says...

<<SNIP>>
If you gals want to work 60 hour work weeks and then come home and do
the housework, welcome to equality! Tee hee!

Men couldn't learn
to use a typewriter so they dehumanised women as an inferior species.

Balderdash. Unless the record has been broken, it was a man who was the
fastest typer in the world when I saw him on TV about 5 years ago.

I think that's true. It's also much easier to type fast on an
electronic keyboard than it was on a manual typwriter. N-Key
rollover is a real help. I often jammed up the keys on old
manual typewriters by going too fast.

In my typing class in the late 70's, it was a largely co-ed class
because young men needed typing skills to use computers. This probably
goes back easily to the 1950's.

Sorry, but that is not correct. I know from personal experience that
very few young men took high-school typing courses in the late 60's and
early 70's. At that time, computers (which were very rare and
expensive)did not use a standard keyboard for data entry. They used a
Baudot(5-bit code) keyboard for terminal data entry and a slightly
different keyboard for punched cards. I would guess that about
80% of the male touch typists in the US in 1970 were in the military.
Most of the naval officers that I knew in the 70's were poke-and-
pray typists.

I went to school in the mid-70's and half the class or more were men.
We didn't use computers but rather electric typewriters which worked
similarly to manual ones (with those individual moving type) and later
that selectric "ball".

I think the main reason was that a lot of the men in our class were
interested in business skills and while not thinking about working in a
typing pool, but rather things such as filling out government forms,
typing resumes, etc.

That said, I got you started by mentioning computers.

I learned touch typing in HS from my mother---who was very fast. She
taughtmy siblings and myself to type so that our teachers wouldn't have
toput up with our less-than-perfect penmanship. The skill later proved
helpful as I was able to adapt to the teletype keyboards and the
All-Caps mills used for typing logs and translations in the Navy.
It got me out of a lot of typing classes in my Navy schools.

Entering computer data with a standard keyboard wasn't really common
until about the mid 1980s. The transition to full upper and lower
case was particularly traumatic for C programmers. Many earlier
languages were not case-sensitive as they assumed an all-upper-case
terminal.

Nearly all computer languages I use today are not case sensitive either.
Only crazed idiots use case sensitive instructions and then have to deal
with typos and syntax errors and trying to figure out if their function
requires the Counter, counter, or CounTer variable. :-)

I have fond memories of my typing class in the 1976 and later using a
T1000 terminator, er, TERMINAL :-) in 1982. In 1984, I started doing
system operations on a linefeed printer style terminal that went back to
1975.

Punch cards? I used them too but they were quire rare by the time I
came on the scene in 1982. They were used for legacy applications such
as printers that needed restarting and had the cards as boot "memory".

I also remember working as a paperboy back in the mid 1970's and
visiting the newspaper room and they all had those burn-your-eyes green
screen terminals.

When I took a train from Lviv to Krakow about 10 years ago, I got a trip
down memory lane when I saw one of those old klackety multi-colored
keyboards. Remember those? They CLACK loud! I bought a ticket and it
took her 10 minutes to type in my ticket info. (Good thing the commie
era waiting room was so comfortable in VIP class :-) She also had the
oldest monitor I had seen for a while.

regards,
PolishKnight
.

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