What was I thinking?

A few days ago I had a rather severe senior moment. Or junior moment. Or something.

I was doing my job. I was writing some Java code and made a weird typo. I think I was trying to type a left parenthesis and went way off target. I suddenly had a strong feeling that I had done the keystrokes that I would have done had I been typing on an IBM 029 Keypunch.

Through most of my time at New Mexico Tech we wrote our programs on decks of punch cards. I was good at touch typing on them. I knew how to type all the special characters.

So when I felt that I had regressed to my key punching days, I panicked.

I searched for a chart of the key punch's keyboard layout (isn't the Internet wonderful?) to see if I had indeed been confused about the kind of keyboard I was using.

I wasn't.

Neither of the key punch's parentheses was anywhere near where my misguided finger was going. I just slipped. I hope.

But this gave me the opportunity to reminisce about my college days and to be amazed at how much things have changed in such a short time.

It's been more than 30 years since I've used keypunches. But there is one behavior that I picked up from using them that I wish I could unlearn.

If you look at the keyboard layout chart you'll see that there are "Numeric" and "Alpha" keys where a normal keyboard's "Shift" keys are. Letters on a keypunch are all capitals. Pressing the Numeric key and a letter key gives you the special character on the letter's key. Numeric-N gives you the left parenthesis, for example.

In normal use of the keypunch you would rarely use the "Alpha" key. The Alpha key would be used only when a program card is used. The program card could set to make certain columns to behave as if you were pressing the Numeric key when typing. If anything shows up in the first six columns of a line of Fortran code, it has to be numbers so you could make a program card that effectively presses the Numeric key for you when typing in the first six columns. If for some reason you needed to type an alphabetic character in one of those first six columns when such a program card was used, you'd have to press the Alpha key. I was an expert at making useful program cards that would do numeric shifting, tabbing, duplicating, and whatever.

Anyway, I used only the left shift key when typing on a keypunch.

To this day, I use only the left shift key on a computer keyboard. When I need a capital Q, A, Z or an exclamation point, I press the shift key with my pinky and my ring finger takes over the pinky's duty. My ring finger gets quite a workout if I have to type something like "WES SAW A WAX SAX!"

I suppose I don't really need to use the right shift key but I wish I could.