this post was submitted on 31 May 2024
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From my experience, touch typing and using all fingers (home row technique I think it's called) is less common among boomers, especially men. Even in professional settings I've seen men peck at their keyboards with just their pointer fingers. The slowness of this technique might explain the use of abbreviations at the desktop?
There's probably some really weird graphs to be made of who hunts and pecks and who uses the home row
I don't have the stats on it, but I suspect that up until about the 80s men would mostly hunt and peck, and women were a mixture, because a lot of secretaries and such who had to type professionally were women. As computers became bigger more men would start using the home row, peaking around the 90s/early 2000s when pretty much every milenial had computer/typing classes (although I know plenty of my millennial peers still hunt and peck) and now it's on a bit of downward slope with Gen z/alpha who are more used to phones/iPads.
I work in 911 dispatch, it's a bit of a thing I've noticed with our younger new hires, they're somewhat less comfortable with keyboard/mouse controls than the rest of us (and for added confusion, we have trackball mice, a lot of them have never seen or used one before or an old mechanical mouse with a ball. A handful of them have barely used mice at all and are more used to laptop trakcpads and touch screens. They catch on pretty quick but there's definitely a bit of a learning curve.
But why? These were never more popular than traditional mice
They're supposed to be better at preventing RSI
RSI?
repetitive stress injury i think.
I don't know the reasoning, I've always personally liked trackballs so I never questioned it
But if I had to hazard a guess, maybe because we each have 5 or 6 monitors, and it's easier to just give the trackball a good spin when you have to go from one far edge to the other than it is to pick up and move your mouse a few times or to provide adequate desk space.