Typewriters in the era of computers: How fast do you type?

LONDON: If your skills were honed in the typewriter era before the advent of computers, you make different kinds of mistakes and have different speeds, but a new study suggests that the fastest typists make fewer errors and press the next key before the previous one is released.

Analysing the largest dataset on typing speeds and styles, based on 136 million keystrokes from 168,000 volunteers, researchers at Cambridge and the Aalto University in Finland found that the fastest typists performed between 40%-70% of keystrokes using rollover typing, in which the next key is pressed before the previous key is released.

Volunteers from more than 200 countries were asked to transcribe random sentences in the study, and their accuracy and speed were assessed by the researchers, who say the strategy of pressing the next key before the previous key is released is known in the gaming community but hasn’t been observed in a typing study. “Crowdsourcing experiments that allow us to analyse how people interact with computers on a large scale are instrumental for identifying solution principles for the design of nextgeneration user interfaces,” said the study’s co-author, Per Ola Kristensson, from University of Cambridge’s department of engineering.

Since most knowledge of how people type is based on studies from the typewriter era, researchers say that decades after typewriters were replaced by computers, people make different types of mistakes. For example, errors where one letter is replaced by another are now common, whereas in the typewriter era typists often added or omitted characters.