TekMetrics (Brainbench) | Transcript ID 91390 | September 5, 1999 | Keyboard Typist

I took a very different kind of certification test—one that didn’t measure programming knowledge or logical reasoning. Instead, it measured something physical, practical, and surprisingly personal: typing speed and accuracy.

Today (2025), typing is mainly taken for granted. Autocorrect, predictive text, and touchscreens do much of the work, and artificial intelligence using large language models paired with voice recognition are moving in a direction where typing may become a relic of the past. But back then, typing fast without looking was a status symbol. It meant confidence. It meant experience. It meant you belonged. If you were still pecking at the keyboard, you were behind.

My journey to typing competency started long before any certification existed.

Mechanical Typewriter

My dad bought an old typewriter (Underwood No. 5?) from the postmaster at his mother’s post office for five dollars. My father explained that the postmaster often had a selection of antiques for sale. Grandma would usually help out when staff didn’t show up, and eventually started working for the postmaster as a clerk. As a child, I would sometimes play with the typewriter, and later use it to fill out summer job applications in the late 80s so they would stand out and be legible. It had a dual black-and-red ribbon and keys that stuck if you typed faster than the machine could keep up—a living reminder of why the QWERTY layout was invented to slow typists down.

Atari 400 Programming

In the early 80s, my family got an Atari 400. My brother and I would spend hours with a game programming book from the library. We would sit at our Atari 400, taking turns typing line after line of code. The Atari 400 was built with kids in mind — which meant a flat membrane keyboard that was easy to clean… and painful to use. Each key had a lip, and you needed real pressure to trigger it. For small fingers spending hours upon hours programming, that meant sore hands. Sometimes blisters. But it was worth it.

We would work for days to enter the code, carefully typing every strange symbol and unfamiliar command. My brother and I would switch roles. One would read the code while the other looked at the keyboard and typed it in. It was quicker and less stressful on our eyes and back than constantly moving and looking back and forth between the book, the bright blue television, and the keyboard, hunting for letters. Some punctuation was too advanced for kids our age, so we invented our own names. A colon was “double-dots.” A semicolon was “double-dots with a comma.” Other symbols were less common, but we described what we understood them to represent. We did not yet know the advanced grammatical rules, but programming demanded precision, so we learned to communicate in our own way.

When we finally finished typing, we saved our work with the CSAVE command to an audio cassette tape with our 410 Audio Cassette Recorder at 600 baud—the height of technology at the time—and then we got to enjoy what we had built. Tank games in mazes. Painting programs controlled with joysticks. Beeping sounds telling us where we were on screen. We were kids, but we were also programmers, long before we had the language to describe what we were doing.

Looking back, we were doing pair programming decades before Agile, Extreme Programming, and modern software culture turned it into an industry practice. We learned to debug by identifying our own mistakes or those in the original source code we were reading.

High School Typing Class

Later came my high school typing class. My younger brother had taken it the year before and was so fast that the teacher could not keep up with him. When my turn came, I already had years of keyboard instinct thanks to childhood programming. We used old electromechanical typewriters hidden inside desks so students couldn’t see their hands. Digital keyboards with small LCD screens that included dictionaries for spell checking were all the rage at the time. A giant keyboard chart hung on the wall. The machines only struck the page when you reached the end of a line, filling the room with a loud chorus of metal clattering like a factory in rhythm.

I was the fastest in the class — except when compared to my brother. He had blistering speed. I hovered between speed and accuracy, determined but realistic.

TekMetrics Typist Certification

So when TekMetrics offered a Keyboard Typist certification, I took it. Not for curiosity this time. For validation.

The test measured speed and accuracy without mercy. No personality. No nostalgia. Just numbers. There was no dramatic words-per-minute display, but passing it proved something meaningful:

I could type confidently.
I could type professionally.
I could type without looking.
I could type because all those years had mattered.

This certification was more than another digital badge. It validated muscle memory built through childhood creativity, family competition, painful keyboards, noisy classrooms, job hunting, and thousands of hours writing code.

Typing was never just something I did.

It helped shape who I became.

And I am still proud of it.