Learned on a portable typewrite. My father dictated and I typed. Before long I was copying magazine articles for fun and practice. The U.S. Army reinforced the skilsl under the threat of extending my Advanced Individual Training period if I did not pass their test. Can't remember my final corrected WPM but I greatly enjoyed the REFRAD (Release From Active Duty) after completing the class.

 

Edit: I still usually double space after a period. This is a habit I learned in typing class and it is really, really hard to break. Most word processors want a single space after a period and automatically adjust spacing.

I never heard of that double space. What is it for?

 

I never heard of that double space. What is it for?

It was a standard for business correspondence that two spaces follow a period at the end of a sentence.

Modern word processors automatically adjust white space after a period so this is no longer necessary.

 

I never heard of that double space. What is it for?

A very common practice in typesetting is to put two spaces between sentences.

The origins (and controversy) around single- or double-spaced sentences dates to the very beginning of typesetting. There are lots of historical examples of both. Typesetters tried to adopt practices that made the text "look good", and this was all very subjective and there was a lot of variability in the spacing of early printing machines.

But once typewriters (which were almost universally monospaced) came along most people (that mattered, such as editors and such) decided that two spaces after a period looked more natural and helped readers establish a more natural pace when reading printed matter. So people learned to type that way. That carried over naturally to computers since initially most fonts were monospaced. But as proportional-spaced fonts became more common, lots of people (again, the ones that mattered) maintained (or, where possible, dictated) that double-spacing of sentences was not only not necessary, but was to be avoided.

Lots of studies have tried to answer the question of which is better and the results have been all over the board with very few claiming that it really matters a whole lot.

Personally, since I never had any formal education in typing, I always put a single space after sentences simply because I never knew any better. I was probably in my late 20s before I ever became aware that a double-space convention even existed.

 

We had eight Teletype Model 33 ASRs as terminals for my first computer science class.

We had one in our tech school class. It talked to a Univac 1103(?) two floors above by telephone modem.

A classmate at the time worked at one of the cities newspapers. This was the era when you called the newspaper to run a classified advertisement.

As you said what the advertisement would say, it was punched into the paper tape on an ASR-33. The person taking the ad could easily outrun the punch mechanism on familiar words. My classmate wanted to do a buffer so that the typist could type at full speed all the time.

 

I had an ASR-33 in my classroom. I sometimes used it to program the PDP-8/e and as the printer. It was pretty good at 110 Baud ASCII.

Had the two TTYs, with cassettes and thermal printers that were 110 baud and 300 baud. In the training environment, I showed the techs how to change the baud rate on the computer and the tty to allow faster loading of the program. I also had a 115k baud monitor we used infrequently.

Typing, typing, typing. That was a useful class.

I should have paid more attention in english and composition classes. I can't diagram a sentence to save my life these days.

I was going to say I use double spaces between sentences however, I didn't practice that in this posting, so I must be working my way away from that.

Funny, in Word, I double space but here ... no. WTF is up with that? Maybe I don't think of this as writing.

 

This is fun.

How does this work, does it load a key logger to know what your typing?

kv

 

I never heard of that double space. What is it for?

It was determined that it improved readability.

 

How does this work, does it load a key logger to know what your typing?

kv

It appears to be a locally executed Javascript app.

 

It appears to be a locally executed Javascript app.

I like it because it lets anyone type without joining their site. I enjoy the sounds of a real typewriter.

Evolution of the typewriter "Interesting"

kv