Dvorak 4 from orangebutton, a weblog by George Girton

Dvorak 4 . . . . . may 20 2003 — ob48.dat

This morning is the second all-day-long software extravaganza at the ICSC: tonight we will break down the booth and head back to Los Angeles, tired after three days of standing up and talking. In the meantime, though, let me relate some more Dvorak keyboard adventures (not including the present one, which I'm writing while Irene watches the ER season finale downstairs).

Back when I was learning to type, what I really wanted to do was transcribe conversation, typing as fast as people talk. Guess what? There are very few jobs in this category! I had ordered my two Dvorak Selectric elements from Camwill Corp, 835 Keeaumoku Street, Honolulu, Hawaii (they've since moved). I got a 12-point courier and a 10-point prestige elite element, the first of several. As it turned out, all I ever needed was the courier typeface. I applied around town, and eventually landed a job at an insurance agency as a policy typist. The typing was too meticulous to really build up my speed, but it got me into the market. Plus, the job was way too boring, and I bailed.

But then, about a year later, I answered an ad in the Los Angeles Times for a court reporting company. They paid a dollar per page, which I figured was perfect to help me get my speed up. For the first week, I struggled to make 35 pages per day. The second week, I was hitting 40 pages pretty consistently. We used erasable paper, and just pushed the selectric element out of the way to erase mistakes. It turned out to be a lot faster than using a built-in correcting tape. Also, there was the added advantage of not having to buy new correcting tapes all the time.

Within six months I could pretty much count on sitting down at the typewriter and churning out 75 or 80 pages. Even with my Dvorak advantage I was still the slowest typist in the company.

One day the following year, though, a funny thing happened. I walked into a computer store, actually it was a store, an Apple dealer in Santa Monica called The Computer Store. I heard a computer printer typing away, it was a Selectric controlled by a computer. The machine limit of the Selectric was about 120 words per minute.

Compared to what I was used to hearing in the office, on my own typewriter, the computerized Selectric I heard in the store didn't sound all that fast. I thought a computer would give me an edge, if programmed appropriately, but computer keyboards at the time did not have Dvorak layouts.

I remember one day I sat down at my typewriter in the morning, and when I got up about 18 hour later, there were 180 pages of court transcript in my out-basket. On my birthday in 1980 I went down to Hawthorne Boulevard in Lawndale and bought a 16K Apple II Computer for nearly a thousand dollars. When you buy an Apple computer (a Mac) today, it comes with a disk drive, and there is also a built-in option to select a Dvorak keyboard implemented in software. This little puppy had neither, but it would have both by the end of the year.

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