My ability to type fast
The one ability I have never been shy about is my ability to type quickly on a QWERTY keyboard. I’m not talking thumb or index finger typing here. I’m talking full keyboard, hands on it like hands on a piano; fingers lightly curled resting lightly on top of keys ready to plunge, alight, and scurry to the next, upon command kinda typing. No look too. When someone said to me, “Wow Fahri, you type so fast!” I would turn to them while I carried on typing, look them in the eye and reply with mock helplessness, “Right? I can’t help myself!” But it’s true. I cannot type slow. Once you can type fast, you can’t type slow. It’s like being on the internet. When you are used to 1 millisecond, 5 milliseconds is long. Even though I’m no competition winner, I can capture regular speech almost verbatim. It’s sloppy at times on the first pass but most of it is in. I can keep up with the quick flow of thought along with the accompanying clutter of crap compared to using a pen. With the keyboard, it is as if my mind were plugged directly into my fingers, bypassing any thinking. For that reason, I don’t think typing quickly to be necessarily a good thing. I find the texture of my writing with a keyboard harder and rawer compared to when using a pen, which has, in contrast, a more considered and refined quality of expression to it. I feel the pen better mediates my thoughts compared to a keyboard, which is simply a tool to capture raw thoughts. These can be polished and revised until it is the best version of itself. But there is something to be said for writing on paper by hand with pen and ink. Besides the written word, there is pleasure in the act of writing itself to be savoured; the feel of the pen in hand, the glide of the nib on paper, the shades of colour the ink goes through as it dries. That quality of relationship is difficult to have with a keyboard, which is simply an input device. I don’t love my keyboards like I love my fountain pens. I type quicker in English than in Malay. Typing quickly and accurately is now an important skill in the computer age. Now, we type more than we write. This may change when video and speech become the primary medium of communication, and converting text to speech, no matter what the accent, at an accuracy rate of 99% becomes cheap and ubiquitous. I am often asked how I came to type fast. Did I take typing classes? Was there software that could help train my fingers to type fast? Did I study from a book? Was it something my mother ate when she carried me? No, to all of them. There are many formal ways to learn to type quickly. But I didn’t learn that way. I had an oblique route: computer games. Or more accurately, early PC adventure computer games. Lots of them. When I was young, I went over to my cousins’ house five doors down from mine every day to play their computer games. Their parents in their wisdom bought the Apple II which had many excellent games going for it at the time. Games like Karateka, Loderunner, Saigon, Wyndam Hill, and many others were popular. I played and finished all of them. My parents for reasons best known to themselves had more important things to do other than to look into this gaming deficiency of mine. So whilst I played many games on the Apple, it did not develop my typing because back then we used a joystick (get that grin off your face; actually, never mind, keep it on) or a few of the keys on a keyboard to move and perform actions. The groundbreaking moment was borne out of a combination of my parents’ foresight and ignorance. They had the foresight to realize I should be computer literate even though they were ignorant about computers and tech themselves. I remember when we picked up the computer. It was from a shop near my old house in Damansara Utama. In the 1980s, Uptown Damansara was known as Damansara Utama. Most of the shop lots around the area were empty. There happened to be a computer shop at the far end of the row of shops. One afternoon, when I was nine or ten, my parents brought me along. It wasn’t to consult me about the purchase but to show me the computer they acquired for me. I think it cost them three-plus grand, which was a sizable amount in the 1980s. I had no idea what computer it was. All I knew was it was a computer. We brought it home. My father put it together. I pounced on it right after. But I was quickly disappointed. It was very different from the Apple II that I was accustomed to. I discovered my parents bought me a Personal Computer, a PC, powered by an Intel chip. It used an operating system named DOS. It didn’t have a graphical interface. You just had a command line. The PC did not have as many well-made games as the Apple II had. So I ignored the PC in the beginning. I found a few games like Digger (a variant of Pac-Man) and Pong (which was ping pong) which were addictive for a short time. Those games were no better than the repetitive consoles games produced by Atari, Commodore 64, and others. My poor impression of the PC continued until I discovered the Pineapple Computer Store. It was located on the top floor of Jaya Supermarket at Section 14, Petaling Jaya. If you played PC games and lived in Petaling Jaya, you could not not know that place. That shop was the PC game mecca in the 1980s and early 1990s; a godsend for us gamers. They sold bootleg copies
