My keyboard ability is hunt-and-peck, but I've gotten pretty good at it over the years. Never needed typing skills for my occupation.
Now that a Morse code test is in the can, maybe the FCC will require a typing test at various speeds
. More appropriate for the future "Compu-ham".
In my field of Telecom in the late 70's we were rapidly going away from electromechanical PBX's (Private Branching eXchanges) to the electronic so called Stored Logic programable systems. In fact the first of its kind I saw was the Northern Telecom SL-1 which stood for Stored Logic number 1.
When we went to school on this system in I think it was 1979, I quickly noticed that the "old guys" in the school were having a hard time communicating with the system which was through a teleprinter interface. (glass terminals were not all that common yet). And the main reason they were having a hard time with the new machine was because they couldn't type. Having taken typing in school and been working a lot of RTTY as a ham to keep my typing skills up and actually improving my speed by working RTTY, I had no problems at all with this new fangled type of phone system.
In fact I took to it like a duck to water. In my organization I was soon a supervisor with men working under me. I could rapidly program and troubleshoot these systems with their built in diagnostics by using the MMI (Man Machine Interface) of a simple Teletype terminal hooked to these systems. Older guys who had been pretty good telephone men, fell to the wayside, because they could not rapidly program and troubleshoot these systems.
A new era had dawned and I had gotten right in on the ground floor.
Back around 2000 the new VOIP systems were starting to take hold and the telecom world was undergoing a rapid upheaval again. You still needed to know how to type, but you also needed to know a good deal about computer networking. I had been buying, building and messing with computers for many years. Again I managed to survive and transition into this new world by my interest in computers and managed to get caught up pretty quickly.
Even today many "old timers" will say "I don't know much about computers and even less about computer networking". Yeah, well you better learn or get left behind. They say old dogs cannot learn new tricks. But they can. If they want to.
I am out of the job market now, and well into retirement, but it never hurts to stay on top of trends. Who knows you may even be called on for help from friends and associates.
